Christmas Canzonetta

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ISBN-13: 978-1540454935 2016

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Other Publications by The Linnet´s Wings "The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow" ISBN 13: 978-1480176423 " Randolph Caldecott, The House that Jack Built" ISBN-13: 978-1483977669 "One Day Tells Its Tale to Another by Nonnie Augustine" ISBN-13: 978-1480186354 "About the Weather-- Spring Trending" by Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick ISBN-13: 978-0993049330 "This Crazy Urge to Live" by Bobby Steve Baker ISBN-13: 978-0993049-0-9 "Disabled Monsters" by John C. Mannone ISBN-13:978-1522869504 "Three Pounds of Cells" by Oonah V Joslin ISBN-13: 978-1535486491

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CHRISTMAS CANZONET Ta b l e o f C o n t e n t s Prologue: When Allingham met Tennyson xii Epigraph: The North Wind xv

POETRY

SECTION ONE: WHEN NATURE MATTERS

The opening of ramsons by Julian Dobson 3 Muldaddie by Jane Fuller 4 The Tree, The House, The Sheep, The Book, The Hand by Oonah V Joslin 6 All I Want For Christmas by Judith A. Lawrence 9 Restless Fingers Weaving Dreams by Sherry Allyn Norman 11 Christmas Week by Adrian McRobb 12 Wrekin Yew by Jim Hatfield 15 Circuit by Tina Cole 17 The Old Man from Blackberry Hill Farm by Tom Sheehan 19 Blue Walls by Elizabeth Hitchcock 20 Rosh Hashanah 1978 by by Jonathan Beale 22 Accidentally by Susan Tepper 24 The Angel in the Mirror by Robert Grossmith 26

SECTION TWO: SOMETHING MORE

A Prairie Christmas Wish by Tom Sheehan 31 Seeding the Moon by Ronald E. Shields 39 Expectations by Barry Charman 40 In the Air by Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick 42 Beech by Jim Hatfield 44 Persephone Is At That Difficult Age by Kirsten Luckins 47 No Choice by James Graham 48 I Hear Someone Speaking by James G. Piatt 50 TLW/vi

Raphael Kirchner

MAGAZINE

POETRY

Paysage by Roberta Feins 52 The Barn at Gospel Eddie’s Pond by Tom Sheehan 55 The Seer by Clare McCotter 58

SECTION THREE: A CONSPIRACY OF LOVE Writing to complain by Lesley Timms 62 Catching the Wind by Oonah V Joslin 65 Christmas Forest by Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick 67 Santa´s Belt byMarie Lynam Fitzpatrick 68 The Fairies (A Child's Song) William Allingham 73 If I knew by Anonymous 74 Illustrations by Charles Robinson 78 Hamlet: Lines spoken after the ghost’s exit by Willian Shakespeare 89 Christmas at Sea by Robert Louis Stevenson 90

MUSIC

SECTION FOUR: MURMURATIONS

My Father Made Men by R.p Verlaine 96 Angel, Sweet Lady by Hannah Welfare 98 Jigsaw by Tina Cole 101 Composting by Julian Dobson 102 Laceless by Jim Hatfield 105 Winter Haiku Sequence by Liza McAlister Williams 107 Cold Cast by Clare McCotter 108 Starlings by Jim Hatfield 110 Goitside by Julian Dobson 112 Living by Jim Hatfield 114

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Conversation by Sergey Solomko

SECTION FIVE: OTHER DREAMS

The Boundless Arc and Other Dreams by Michael Campagnoli 119 Late Night Guitar by Tom Sheehan 145 Bergamot by Pippa Little 146 But Now I Must Sleep! by Margaret Kerswell 148 Natural History by Jonathan Beale 150 Things That Happen While You Watch by Tom Sheehan 152 Monday Morning Blues by Tina Cole 157 Love Charm by Roberta Feins 159 Epic by Bill West 160 LIFE AND LADDERS by Catherine Power Evans 162 RAMSEY by John Grey 165 The Beach by Jeff Price 169 THOSE ILLEGALS by John Grey 171 Late night-train times by Jonathan Beale 173

The Red Tree by Piet Mondrian

SHORT STORIES

A Prairie Christmas Wish by Tom Sheehan 31 The Boundless Arc and Other Dreams by Michael Campagnoli 119

CLASSIC ART

At Star , Le Havre (Miss Dolly, English Singer), Henri de ToulouseLautrec 2 Study Of Three Hands by Albrecht Durer 7 The Horse Chestnut by Mary Cassatt 8 Woodland Waterfall by Tom Thomson 10 St. Francis Of Assisi Preparing The Christmas Crib At Grecchio

by Giotto 13 Trunk Of An Old Yew Tree by Vincent Van Gogh 14 Fairies by Charles Rennie Mackintosh 16 Grandfather And Grandson by Vasily Perov18 The Dragon Of Smoke Escaping From Mount Fuji,

by Katsushika Hokusa 21 The Fishes, In Their Joy by Arthur Rackham 23

ILLUSTRATION

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Happy New Year by Raphael Kirchner 24 Naked Young Woman In Front Of The Mirror by Giovanni Bellin 26 Water Lilies, Pink by Claude Monet 38 Robbed Violin Player by Jan Steen 41 There Was A Lovely Fairy In The Air by Charles Robinson 42 Building The Winter Studio, Ekely by Edvard Munch 45 A Walk In The Park by Victor Borisov-Musatov 46 The Sisters by Mary Cassatt 49 The Gate Of Memory by Dante by Gabriel Rossett 51 Three Dancers. Yellow Skirts, Blue Blouses by Edgar Degas 53 White Barn by Childe Hassam 54 A Mountain by Wassily Kandinsky 59 'Fairy Tales: Teremok. Mizgir' by Heorhiy Narbut 64 Market At Gisors, Rue Cappeville by Camille Pissarro 66 The Red Sleigh by Clarence Gagnon 68 Horse Racing In Winter by Clarence Gagnon 69 A Herbaceous Border by Helen Allingham (1848 - 1926) 72 The Smiling Spider by Odilon Redon 76 Man And Woman I by Edvard Munch 96 Brita As Iduna by Carl Larsson 98 Head Of An Old Lady by Thomas Lawrence 100 Big Fishes Eat Small Fishes by Pieter Bruegel the Elder 103 Snow Falling In The Lane by Edvard Munch 104 In The Room, Winter, by Boris Kustodiev 106 Winter Landscape by Wassily Kandinsky 109 The Rooks Have Come Back by Aleksey Savrasov 111 Negro Gold Drawing Shéhérazade Costume, Ballet Diaghilev

by Leon Bakst 113 Herd Of Sheep Under An Oak Tree by Ivan Shishkin 115 Old Ukraine Bandura-Player by Heorhiy Narbut 144 Starlings And Cherry Tree by Ohara Koson 147 Portrait Of Juliette Courbet As A Sleeping Child by Gustave Courbet 149 Sunset Over Lake Leman by Gustave Courbet 151 Peonies by Childe Hassam 153 TLW/ix

Charles Robinson

Flower Store And Dairy Store by Childe Hassam 156 The Remarkable Rocket by Charles Robinson 161 Ladder Of Virtues (Folio 216r) by Herrad of Landsberg 163 ONE EYE ON YOU by Louis Wain 164 Still Life And A Window by Arthur Segal 168 Before The Snow by Paul Klee 170 Landscape With Carriage And Train by Vincent van Gogh 172

The Selfish Giant 86

PHOTOSHOP

Christmas Fairy, PS MLF, 2016 30 Summer House Garden by Max Slevogt, PSMLF 2016 63 Sleighs Ahoy, PS MLF, 2016 70

CLASSIC ILLLUSTRATIONS

Charles Robinson She Began Nursing Her Child Again Singing A Sort Of Lullaby To It 78 The Magic Of The Cobweb 79 The Secret Garden 80 Ahem - Said The Mouse With An Important Air 81 They Saw A Dove Hovering Above His Head 82 He Said I Am Surprised I Expect Its A Party 83 You Don't Look Like Margaret 84 Child Hiding In Rose 85

LET'S GO!

One Eye on You by Louis Wain

'It's time to dance: The woods are white with stars' -- Julian Dobson

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EDITORS FOR THE Marie Fitzpatrick

Online: The Linnet's

ISSUE:

OFFICES

Wings Submissions

Marie Fitzpatrick

Surface: Publishing,

and Zoetrope Virtual

Oonah Joslin

Mullilngar, Co.

Studio

WEB DATA AND

Westmeath, Ireland

SUBMISSIONS

Design, Carchuna,

Peter Gilkes

Granada, Andalusia,

DESIGN

Spain

Girl Ranging Her Hair by Mary Cassatt

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Prologue: When Allingham Met Tennyson 1851-1853 I VENTURED to Send my first volume of verse (1850) to Tennyson from Ballyshannon. I don't think he wrote to me, but I heard indirectly that he thought well of it ; and during a visit to London in the summer of 1851 Coventry Patmore, to my boundless joy, let me know that I might call on the great Poet, then not long married, and living at Twickenham.

Saturday June 28, was the appointed day, and in the warm afternoon I walked from Twickenham Railway Station to Montpelier Row, quite away from the village. It proved to be a single row of about a dozen moderate-sized houses, that seemed dropped by accident among quiet fields and large trees, Chapel House where T. lived (so called I know not why) being the last at the south end of the terrace, where I think the byroad ended.

I was admitted, shown upstairs into a room with books lying about, and soon came in a tall, broadshouldered swarthy man, slightly stooping, with loose dark hair and beard. He wore spectacles, and was obviously very near-sighted. Hollow cheeks and the dark pallor of his skin gave him an unhealthy appearance.

He was a strange and almost spectral figure. The Great Man peered close at me, and then shook hands cordially, yet with a profound quietude of manner. He was then about forty-one, but looked much older, from his bulk, his short-sight, stooping shoulders, and loose careless dress. He looked tired, and said he had been asleep and was suffering from hay-fever. Mrs. Tennyson came in, very sweet and courteous, with low soft voice, and by and by when I rose to take leave she said, 'Won't you stay for dinner?' which I was too happy to do. Mr. Tennyson went out, and returning took me upstairs to his study—a small room looking out to the back over gardens and trees. He took up my volume of poems, saying, 'You can see it is a good deal dirtier than most of the books.'

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looked sharp at it to see if any of the rhymes were forced.' He objected to 'rose' and 'clothes' in 'The Touchstone' (since corrected). Then he asked, 'Do you dislike to hear your own things read?' and receiving a respectfully encouraging reply, read two of the iEolian Harps, 'first.' 'Is it all in vain?‘ then, 'What saith the River.' The rich, slow solemn chant of his voice glorified the little poems. In reading the last line of the second — 'For ever, ever, ever fled away!‘ he paused after the two 'evers' and gave the third as by an afterthought, thus adding greatly to the impressiveness. He especially admired — 'Night with her cold fingers/Sprinkles moonbeams on the dim sea-waste.'

I said, 'That was Donegal Bay.' T. replied, 'I knew you took it direct from nature.'

The pieces never seemed to me so good before or since.

At dinner there was talk of Wordsworth, etc. T. spoke of George Meredith's poems, lately sent to him, author only twenty-three; 'I thanked him for it and praised it — “Love in the Valley 'best.''

I said I also knew the book, and had bought it.

T. gets enough poetry without buying : 'They send me nothing but poetry!'

'As if you lived on jam,' I said.

Taken from: 'Diary' by William Allingham

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Epigraph: The North Wind Doth Blow The north wind doth blow and we shall have snow And what will the robin do then, poor thing?

He'll sit in the barn and keep himself warm And hide his head under his wing, poor thing.

The north wind doth blow and we shall have snow And what will the swallow do then, poor thing?

Oh, do you not know? He's gone long ago To a land that is warmer than ours, poor thing.

The north wind doth blow and we shall have snow And what will the children do then, poor things?

When lessons are done they'll jump, skip and run, And play till they keep himself warm, poor things.

Old Rhyme

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'Some say that ever, ’gainst that season comes Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated, The bird of dawning singeth all night long; And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad, The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike, No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm, So hallow’d and so gracious is the time.'

Hamlet: Act I, Scene 1 from Hamlet by William Shakespeare (1603)

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When Nature Matters

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The opening of ramsons by Julian Dobson It's the year's birthday: a blaze of beech above, emerald gloss below, a blush as wood anemones fold themselves for sleep.

Put dirt around your feet; let ferns curl from your toes. Greet the disorder, bindweed-brazen: rub sunshine in your skin.

Let dry or sodden limbs erupt in green, be bramble-muscled, twist towards the light; sling rainbows on your shoulders, wrap warm breeze around your cheeks. Every bubble of the brook is rhythm, each tumble of the stream a poem.

It's time to dance: the woods are white with stars.

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Bio/Comment Jane lives in the South Rhinns of Galloway on Muldaddie hill overlooking the sea. The spectacular Scottish landscape informs and inspires her writing. She has been published by Scottish Book Trust and

Muldaddie by Jane Fuller (The meeting of two headlands)

Meet me on the headland, you know the place I mean.

Where the pad of ancient footsteps echoes softly in between the wraiths of mislaid sailors hanging round the standing stones and sky runs on for acres over paths long overgrown.

Northwords Now. She has had poems and prose online in Football Poets, Writer’s Against Prejudice and Southlight Magazine.

Meet me on the scarp rim slender toes abut the edge.

Watch Peregrine corner Tystie on sparkling mica ledge as Kittiwake tones her doleful air above the metal sea and currents create mirrors woven through with memory.

Meet me at the axis where land and sea collide.

The waters deep within us running with the moon-drawn tide as billow maidens sweetly sing to tease toward the stones and pulsing, longed for freedom fizzes deep within our bones.

Meet me at Muldaddie when the spume begins to flail, the wind turns hard nor’ wester and pebbles crash and wail.

When a finger’s breadth of shadow is all that remains of the sun and Raven calls out ‘warning’ for she knows what I’ve become.

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Bio/Comment Oonah Joslin is poetry editor at "The Linnet's Wings." She writes poetry and micro-fiction. Her book “Three Pounds of Cells” ISBN: 13: 9781535486491 is available online at" Linnet's Wings Press." The first part of her novella "A Genie in a Jam," is serialised at "Bewildering Stories."

You can follow Oonah on Facebook or at Parallel Oonahverse.

The Tree, The House, The Sheep, The Book, The Hand by Oonah V Joslin The tree its branches spread towards the sky glimmers beneath the myriad nightly stars fans its protective canopy over the meadow flock in daylight hours.

The house elderly under its grey slate roof glories in the longevity of stone shelters human and animals alike lends its sturdy walls to transient bone.

The sheep that spent the summer on the hills comes down to pasture for its lambs in spring leaves us a coat behind for autumn's mists knowing the hardships wintertime can bring.

The book of every year is written thus, each page is turned – each one a season past the book that's blank beyond our daily sketch, fills up so quickly and is done so fast.

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The hand that scribes the pages wrinkles so its frailty counts the passage of the days its pains become a daily letting go 'til dirt divides the parting of the ways.

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Bio/Comment Judith Lawrence is a poet/writer/artist originally from Philadelphia, PA. She is also the editor/publisher of River Poets Journal, a literary magazine, publishing three issues a year, online and in print.

She has published two books, a novella, “The Metamorphosis of Connie Toscano,” a comedic book on IRS Tax Examiner training, “The IRS Chronicles,” five books of poetry, and has been published in numerous online literary journals and anthologies. Currently she is final editing a book of ten short stories.

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All I Want For Christmas by Judith A. Lawrence I want to smell chestnuts roasting on South Street in center city Philadelphia, bustle up Market Street to view Wanamakers’s Christmas animated window display, see The Nutcracker Suite, the sugar plum fairies, fulfill my Christmas shopping list for under ten dollars, go to midnight mass to hear the choir sing Adeste Fideles breathe in incense and myrrh, bake gingerbread cookies, top the Christmas tree with the old tinsel star, wake up Christmas morning to a foot of snowfall grab my old sled, old friends, trek in my mismatched galoshes to the park slide on a blanket of compacted ice squeal all the way to the bottom of Nutbreakers Hill, build that snowman with top hat, buttoned vest, and pipe, sneak eggnog from Great-Aunt Mary’s bowl, wear my new frilly dress, faux fur trimmed coat and shiny black boots for the Christmas party, get stuffed with anisette cookies, sit on Santa’s lap, hear The Little Drummer Boy, ba rumba ba brum, curl in my bundled bed on Christmas night gaze through my window at the heavenly stars fall into blissful sleep believing in the possibility of peace all over this world.

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Bio/Comment Sherry Allyn Norman lives in Southeast Georgia in a small town on a large tidal river. She walks the docks listening to sails snap and lines sing on tall masts as their boats drift and sway with the tides. She sits on the decks of Skipper’s Oyster Bar& Grill, sipping sea creatures from their shells and dreaming of faraway places. She shares her home and office with minions that greatly resemble cats; none of which hesitate to give their opinion on anything in particular.

She writes poetry and has several completed short stories and two completed fantasy novels with two sequels in progress, as well as a collection of fantasy folk tales in the works.

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Restless Fingers Weaving Dreams by Sherry Allyn Norman Restless fingers gather and fold institutional material, crisp and white.

Kneeling, I tuck a lap robe woven in shades of blues and grays and lavender.

Old, old eyes look into the blue and green of mine, Her hazed over stare brightening to an intelligence rare “Hello, lovey,” her whispery voice caresses me.

She forgets my name, every time, but no matter I know she knows me, the me that is me deep down inside of me, and I smile.

“Christmas is nigh, my child, and so we must plan What delights shall we bake, what scents will flood the air we breathe?

And the gifts, oh yes, the gifts we’ll seed With love and laughter and need fulfilled to brimming contentment.

I see your dreams in here, flowing all about inside your mind.

Your soul is growing, ever knowing more and more.

More than you should ever have had to know.

A learning of things, all for a reason, the purpose of which You will know before one more decade passes.”

Trembling hands on my face, in my hair, She pulls me close, and I lay down my head On a lap made warm by the sun and by the cover woven by my hands.

“Rest,” she says, every day.

And so I do With my head in her lap Fragile fingers holding me still, Weaving dreams with the plaiting of my hair.

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Bio/Comment I am a member of Northumbrian Writers, I like to perform poetry in public. Which I mostly do in Morpeth at Open-Mike sessions, and at the Town Hall. I am retired (early) so I can devote more time to my writing, and grandchildren. I used to work at Scottish and Newcastle Breweries, as an engineer, at Gallowgate Newcastle. Prior to this I served in the R.N. also as an engineer. I am not native to the North-East, being from London. so am still a tourist. I wrote this piece after shopping in Northumberland street, prior to Christmas 2015...I just saw the poem, in the things and people around me...

Christmas Week by Adrian McRobb Heavier curtains from forgotten cupboards As dials turn above the carbon limit Ovens now employed as ‘salad-days’ end Coats shrug bear-like in High streets Multicoloured lights, paper, ribbon And…”would you like it gift wrapped?”

Diets now forgotten as temperatures plummet Those happy few bask in coal light’s glow Mulled wine pokered with cinnamon Plum pudding and minced pies collected As the feast draws near and presents wrapped Church forestalls rising excitement Reminding us of eternal truth While white beard and red suits Jingle in our imaginations with promise…

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Bio/Comment 30 years a Shropshire incomer no repeating the experience in North Wales. The Wrekin, near Wellington, albeit small at 1300 feet, is huge in mythology and Shropsire identity. I was introduced to the tree in 1983 on a walk led by Geore 'Mister Wellington' Evans now in his 90s who still walks the hill twice weekly.

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WREKIN YEW by Jim Hatfield Come with me.

I shall introduce you to a tree that predates Christianity.

what it is feels like to be blessed.

Then, when we’ve had our fill, we shall further climb the hill and join hikers, joggers, mountain bikers, doggy walkers, lovers, Sunday strollers and the rest on the pathway to The Wrekin’s crest

The grove in which the yew holds court is difficult to find without a guide but I, sometimes, know the way.

Come, we shall marvel and, when the marvelling is done, I shall lead you out into the sun, along deer tracks,

Then, when we’ve had our fill, we shall further climb the hill and join hikers, joggers, mountain bikers, doggy walkers, lovers, Sunday strollers and the rest on the pathway to The Wrekin’s crest

to rest below the Needle’s Eye and look down upon the Severn as she winds through patchwork fields and, if we are in luck, we might watch buzzards soar and dive with Caradoc and Brown Clee as backdrop and will understand

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CIRCUIT by Tina Cole A lone man, hair fine as clouds, is crossing wasteland where ownerless black dogs circle each other.

The path through his night is too narrow so walks this daily loop, a habit borne of unease and the fear of losing something irreplaceable.

Past the skeleton factory with rusted ribcage and walls encoded with slug graffiti where he defied the dread of idle hands Spent his youth in the foundry, twenty five shillings a week the price of a man, until the great spitting cauldrons were snuffed and days empty now as a New Year calendar.

Returning to the empty flat he abandons muddy boots to the sodden mat unwilling to walk the past any further.

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The Old Man from Blackberry Hill Farm by Tom Sheehan He lived on the edge of the mountain, my grandfather the smoker, and sometimes he’d stay until Saturday burned down and ashed, the rapping of his pipe against the arm of a chair echoing for days after he’d go a sail down the long curve of the field. At our house his pipe was alive, it made rooms move, shifting sideways, leaning like spears, the smoke like sheets seen through. Ceilings came down on him and lifted away on anyone’s breath, someone calling on him, an old ice cutter, boots knee-high, scars deep as bones allowed, often a thread still burned in the flesh of memory, as if that cut had a face.

They’d talk about all-day on the ice, saws serious as pistons, singing, carving blocks out of the pond we swam in long before August let go, his pipe and horses’ breaths tiering their gray-white differences, hawks peaking on slow-motion thermals. They’d talk of bitter cold as if it was a friend they’d put up with for the good of all concerned, or a fool wind coming off the pond’s hind quarters the way a girl held on once, and fires they’d light right out on the ice, like a good friend ought to be talked of.

Crushed ice, shavings thick as orange puree, pieces promising quick liquid, sloshed underfoot. Horses, looming out of an Arabian skyline, great as all outdoors, slid the pond under iron shoes enough to sink any man in all that variety of water, their chains and shackles sure signs of going down good and for the count, bubbles being the last sign you’d ever see, lots of them, lots of old men, lots of old horses, eternal as huge blocks of ice, as much long spirit as any of that clan my grandfather the smoker was part of.

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Bio/Comment Elizabeth Hitchcock is an Alaskan-born poet living in Wisconsin for university.

She is currently creating a collection of dream inspired poetry. Her work is inspired by Darcie Dennigan and Srikanth Reddy.

Blue Walls by Elizabeth Hitchcock Monday-Friday I’m the one with the purple pen, proofreading judgements for seven judges, the kind without robes.

Really, I’m in Wisconsin, Reno, emerald cities, or on some rocks that they called a beach.

Struck by unbidden loneliness, I wait for you to come homein the empty-making turquoise apartment (walls covered with paintingsjellyfish, onion, lake).

I curl up, hungry under your duvet, covered, eating blueberries.

Weekends She is the one with the rolling pin, we’re just here- sipping acrid coffee my dad left in the craft.

Meandering along the riverbeds of glacial silt, selecting stones colored by washed up years, pick up the red stone it’s a reflection of the aurora borealis, I find you naked, covered in fresh chilled mud.

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Wrapped in night by the fire with family- my parents collect lost childrenthey’re dazed and dizzy on the porch underneath the antlers. I count the number of times ghosts tread on the kindling.

Mornings meet the mountains, peaked in snow. It must be some kind of wonderful waste waking up, trapped in sheets with you and your bird tattoos.

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Rosh Hashanah 1978 by Jonathan Beale We accidentally found ourselves Together in Hayes Town.

In the arcade destroying beings from other worlds.

Space Invaders, Defender, Asteroids: The talk grew from nothing Until, the day’s noise and song: The feast of trumpets To go and on….

Not like your New Year or Hogmanay It’s the year 5739. It’s 1978. He laughed As we left the grey Hayes horizon.

“Come round, We’ll eat, eat, eat.”

“This is Aunt Norma.”

Seeing an endless sea of food the table invisible He nudged me and whispered we have to eat Chicken with Almond Stuffing, white fish in white wine Lekach, Matoke, Sweet Quince, Aunt Norma’s Kugel Uncle Jack came in looks serious My 14 years a nothingness.

Uncle Jack ate like man after a day’s labour Then drank And began to regale with anecdotes, jokes, and story And closed with its us Jews Who put the ‘Oy’ in joy.

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Bio/Comment Susan Tepper has been a writer for twenty years. She is the author of six published books of fiction and poetry, with a seventh book (a novella) forthcoming in 2017. For more please visit: www.susantepper.com

Accidentally by Susan Tepper In corners during the coldest months I look for you crouching Mice and lint scattered about your feet democratic in all Arrangements living or dead I come upon this accidentally Dropping a pear and watching it roll untouched past your cold starved feet.

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Bio/Comment “A poem about a supposedly true incident in the life of the Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg (16881772), who claimed to converse with angels. Being spiritually pure, angels resemble their pre-pubescent human selves.”

Robert Grossmith's previous publications include a novel about lucid dreaming (The Empire of Lights, Hamish Hamilton) and stories in Best Short Stories, The Time Out Book of London Short

The Angel in the Mirror by Robert Grossmith That canny old mystic Swedenborg, when asked by his young visitor if he could conjure an angel, led her to a draped wooden frame.

Now, he said, behold: this is how an angel looks.

And drew the curtain up.

The young girl's gaze, one hopes, was drawn to her own reflection and not to the grizzled prophet's towering at her shoulder.

Stories, The Penguin Book of First World War Stories and elsewhere.

He has recently returned to writing poetry after a hiatus of 40 years.

He has a PhD on Vladimir Nabokov and lives in Norfolk.

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SLEEP, sleep, beauty bright, Dreaming in the joys of night; Sleep, sleep; in thy sleep Little sorrows sit and weep.

Cradle Song by William Blake (1757-1827)

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Something More

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Bio/Comment "In my 88th year I strive daily to write 1000 words and most times hit it, but not always. " Sheehan has published 25 books and has multiple work in sites such as Rosebud, Linnet’s Wings, Serving House Journal, Copperfield Review, La Joie Magazine, Literary Orphans, Indiana Voices Journal, Frontier Tales, Western Online Magazine, Faith-Hope and Fiction, Provo Canyon Review, Eastlit, Rope & Wire Magazine, The Literary Yard, Green Silk Journal, Fiction on the Web, The Path, etc. He has 30 Pushcart nominations, 5 Best of the Net nominations (one winner). New book info follows: Swan River Daisy was recently released by KY Stories, and July releases will be The Cowboys from Pocol Press, and Jehrico, from Danse Macabre. His Amazon Author's Page, Tom Sheehan -- is on the Amazon site.)

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A Prairie Christmas Wish by

Tom Sheehan

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I

t was lucky that the old mule, taken as a throw-in part of a deal, lasted long enough to haul in all the firewood from the side of the mountain and from the small, dark valley, before he fell dead in his tracks and was buried right where he fell. Time had caught up with the old mule, as it did with many things. And there was little chance that there’d be any presents for the children, two boys who really kept the spirits at a keen pitch. The snow had drifted in some places as high as 8-10 feet, and the path to the barn was treacherous when any wind was blowing. Gerard Fiddler knew he’d have to walk with a shovel to be sure he’d make it out and back, the snow drifts moving, falling, shutting off what was almost a tunnel at some points. He hoped he didn’t have to try it again before the storm stopped.

At the stove his wife Muriel prepared another meal of venison and bread, the stove hot and keeping a sense of warmth about them, her and him and the two boys that were still tight under a mixed cover of blankets, old flour bags, winter coats, a few furs he’d traded for. They could stay there for the day if they wanted to, Christmas on the doorstep, one day away.

She had one wish.

Cameron Clougherty, Gerard’s friend, had been here in late September, setting up the wood supply against one side of the cabin, covering much of it with a canvas from the old wagon buried by snow behind the barn. Good old Clougherty, who had pulled Gerard wounded from the field at Gettysburg, making sure the doc fixed him, and who had journeyed out here on his own dream and heard Gerard’s name in town and looked him up. Clougherty would keep an eye on him and the family while he was in the area. Clougherty was always on the way to someplace; as he’d say, “Over the rise, and down the skies.” Gerard was convinced "music" began inside Cameron Clougherty.

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made Gerard do his regular chores while “this hired help does the wood pile." He went at it with a ferocious energy, pausing only for water and a lunch of prairie chicken and beans and bread.

“Muriel,” he’d said a few times, “you handle the skittle and the knife better than any woman I ever met, I swear and dare.” She’d blushed each time, another man in the house for a short spell, a different outlook on things, her hoping that Gerard would make a good stand against the coming winter. The last one had been difficult. She had high hopes for the next one.

Now, in its ferocity, it was here, and she was as thankful as Gerard was about the wood piled against the side of the cabin, enough for the worst winter. She had wondered, at first, as Clougherty took down a section of the side wall and put it back up, but knocked it in place from the inside, like another door.

“Why do that, Clougherty, put those boards in backwards?”

She was all quizzical until Clougherty said, “You can get to the wood right from here if you have to, if the winter is fierce you don’t even have to go outside. That’s why I’ll cover the pile up with the canvas off the old wagon.”

“The cold will come in as bad as ever,” she had said, shivers running on her arms, Gerard nodding at the same time but saying nothing.

“I saw it done in a miner’s place in Montana. It’s a good trade-off for a day’s worth of firewood, wouldn’t you say, in a way?” He smiled that broad grin of his, his eyes lit up, asking for an agreeable answer. "This miner in Montana also had another trick in his bag; he hung all the old unused horse blankets from the barn and placed them on the wall where he takes down a board or to get to the wood pile, and replaces boards and blankets after getting a new stock of wood for the stove. It does him pretty good, so I'll do that here if horse blankets don't bother you in the witchen kitchen." He let go a half-laugh at the idea.

Clougherty, thought Muriel, was always thinking of people, doing his best for friends, and she decided he was a real good friend to her husband, to her and the young ones. She knew she'd think of that when winter sat down on them for a long spell, when the cold, bitterly raw days allowed her to think of the warm past, spring bound to come in its due time..

Now she knew, as the wind was kicking up again, a new storm in the offing, that Gerard wouldn’t have to venture outside for wood or anything besides barn duty … at least not too soon. They had flour and beans in the house and a bucket of oats and there was a cache of meat frozen in the box by a window. It was as simple as the access to the woodpile and offered a good trade-off, as Clougherty had affirmed. He had great ideas and she trusted him to high heavens.

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busy with the early storms beating on them and worries about Gerard and his state of mind. More than once, looking at the boys sleeping under a pile of whatever, Gerard had said, “What did I come out here for? Why’d I drag you, Muriel? You’re the best woman I ever knew.”

She worried about that part of Gerard, worried that it might break loose the small chink in his resolve. He was her man and she’d stick with him through it all … had done so on several occasions and was apparently at it again, the wind moaning again. But she gave thanks that the roof was covered with snow, holding some of the heat in place.

“It’s part of winter protection,” Clougherty once explained, “like bears look for when they go to sleep for winter. Once I saw a bear go into a cave up there in Montana and pile up snow from the inside across the entrance to the cave, so nothing could get in there in the winter and disturb his sleep. That’s the most natural protection from snow itself, using it against itself. The Eskimos way up in Canada make their little houses out of it, and crawl in deep and go to sleep.”

For the few short weeks Clougherty was there, helping them out, he told stories about everything he had seen. The boys were in awe of him and the stories, coming to them from a man they believed had been every place and seen everything there was to see. He’d been on the great river and two of the great lakes up north of them, and in the war with their father and had seen the oceans on both ends of the country and told it all … in his short time there, even as he worked like a beaver gnawing down a new home out of the forest and “taking the prize right under your eyes.”

“Isn’t there a woman in your life?” she dared to ask another time. Gerard was upset at that, but said, “So far, for me, it’s been one woman, and that’s Mother Nature at her best and at her worst and I figure I ain’t been denied and she never lied.”

Muriel looked up at that, the questionable look on her face, and he hurriedly replied, “Not that she.

Not to me.” And the chuckle touched them both.

Muriel loved how he’d rhyme things when finishing up a story. It pleased her mightily, and she soon realized, in two or three days at the beginning, that he knew it too. He was a most handsome man, with blond hair that sat like a ball of cotton tight and curly on his head, blue eyes that could not tell a lie to anybody on the face of the Earth, muscles that showed on him from wrists up to hidden bulges, and music in his voice every time he spoke. Muriel knew he must have been swayable with some women despite what he said.

But the days of Cameron Clougherty were long over, winter was atop them with its week-long fury, and no stopping in view. The aroma of baking bread filled the cabin, and she looked up at her top shelf. She was

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measuring what she had put by, what she had used, what she had left. In turn she looked at the small cupboard they had settled in one corner and each visit there was like going to the general store in town; it held much of her hopes for the time being. That was like saying it wouldn’t last forever, or for the whole winter. She tried to avoid further thoughts on the matter.

But Clougherty was gone and Christmas was coming to sit empty at her doorstep. Sadness hit her and she brushed it off immediately just the way she’d brush away a cobweb or a spider web that drifted down from an upper reach.

The doubts fell away when she recalled Clougherty’s smile. It was always a pleasant sight. Her gaze fell on the boys still buried in deep covers, probably measuring the temperature and how it would feel on them as they rose to get dressed. Each was smiling at her from their warm covers, their smiles more pleasant than Clougherty’s, like Gerard’s, full of thanks as well as love.

Christmas without presents for them bothered her until she smelled the bread again, and gave thanks for its promise, and the aroma of venison with a burnt edge all of them liked pushed her into quick thanks for her husband’s hunting skills and his dogged manner, even if it had brought them here to this place without presents for her children. Gerard, she knew, never needed much more than her in his life. She gave thanks for that.

It was in that one thought, in that one minute, that she realized she had forgotten to mark off the last spent day. This was really a day later; this was really Christmas Day. Muriel Fiddler almost fainted. She had lost a day. This was Christmas Day. The boys, without saying a word, knew it. Gerard obviously knew it, and had not said a word about it.

She was crushed. The meal she was preparing they’d had for three days in a row. She had not prepared anything different, anything extra.

As she shook her head, she heard her two sons whispering under their covers. Were they talking about surprise Christmas presents? Was their mother playing a game with them, being so usual in her actions? Was Gerard saying little but thinking much?

She didn’t know what to do. Best to continue her day, their day, the way she was going. What else could she do but be the mother of the brood? The mother in the apron, at the stove, at meal preparation, at the real important things in life.

“You two stay under the covers until I tell you to get dressed.” Insistence was in her voice, and they did not move.

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already, she said, “Might as well get some more of that wood in here, Gerard, while I have the stove nice and hot.

Best bring in a couple of days’ worth. We’ll use it up. The stove’s really hot. Best do it now. That wind is beginning to sound fierce, like a critter in deep pain.” She cast her best smile in support of her request.

She spun back to her work. The two boys sank deeper under covers because the section of wall would be taken down, wood drawn from the pile, the air coming in like a small blast from the far north.

Gerard Fiddler, dreamer, doer, believer in most things, especially in his wife and his children, thankful for at least one good friend and comrade in this life, hastened to do as bid by his wife.

The wall boards, fully vertical all the way, came loose when he took down the three cross bars that Clougherty had put in place. He had done the trick once earlier, just to test it out. The task was easy, and he was thankful for it, thinking of the snow out there. He reached into the pile and extracted the cut logs one piece at a time, sometimes two at a time, his hands feeling the cold come on them with a thick and penetrating smoothness, but no snow coming in with the wood. He almost had a few days’ worth piled on the side before he stacked them beside the stove, when his hand, in another reach into the pile, felt something softer than logs.

He withdrew his hand, then reached again, touched again, and made a sound of surprise in his throat that made Muriel jump, fearing he had been bitten by an incredible critter. The boys had come to sitting positions in their bed across the room, tossing off furs, old coats, and flour bags sewed into severe thickness, ready for whatever.

All of them, Gerard Fiddler, his wife Muriel and their sons, were frozen in place as Christmas, long thought to be absent from this day, came into view in the forms of gaily wrapped packages, four of them, one after another, fell into the room at the feet of Gerard Fiddler. His wife looked on in absolute joy, his sons too, all of them realizing that Cameron Clougherty had done it again, remembered something else he had seen, some special happening that made Christmas the special day it was supposed to be, even as the wind whistled again atop them, winter galloping along under a full grip.

Muriel Fiddler had her wish come true and she was sure that Cameron Clougherty had wanted his wish to be found on Christmas Day, just the way he planned it. ###

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Bio/Comment Born into an itinerant family Ronald E. Shields has spent most of six decades on the run from the bosom of the home fires. Married late in life to the vagabond daughter of a New England schoolmarm his heels have yet to cool to life on the road. He is currently a retired jack-of-all-trades.

Ron’s poetry is informed and driven by his experience of the small moment within the vastness of space. His work can be most recently found in The Linnet’s Wings summer edition. More of his work can be found at poetryontherun.com. This poem is a father poem. Watching my toddler chasing birds around our backyard, I was struck with the idea that birds, even with their tiny brains were superior to my child in this game of chase. Then I thought of all the possibilities he had before him and I felt much better.

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Seeding the Moon by Ronald E. Shields I watch the birds pick at seeds I spread on the rocky soil, so certain, precise, never chipping a beak.

Watching my child, all hands, feet, ungainly head, I am taken by the imprecision, the lack of focus on where the beak should strike.

I have spent my life among the rocks preparing them, arranging them, seeding them.

Then my awkward child raises his uncertain gaze, sees the moon full of dust and reflections.

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Bio/Comment Barry Charman is a writer living in North London. He has been published in various magazines,

Expectations by Barry Charman That you’ll end the year with new and more evolved fears

including Ambit, Firewords Quarterly, Mothership Zeta and Popshot. He has had poems

That you’ll have your heart broken and think, ah, that’s a hurt to fill you full of life

published online and in print, most recently in Bewildering Stories and Gyroscope Review.

That you’ll build higher and forget last year had the same designs

He has a blog at http://barrycharman.blogspot.co .uk/

That you’ll make sense of it all and it’ll suddenly be a party, not a wake That you’ll cross the divide and become that man you could’ve been That you’ll make something of yourself and forget to worry about what’s lost That the emptiness will lose another round and the victory might fill you That there’ll be a hand in yours and not just a year of empty weight That you’ll raise a glass and put it down

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In the Air by Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick It's church and food and frolic, And we're a little melancholic, With Christmas on the wind and in the air.

But its cheer brings laughs with family, And with friends and foe that calmly Celebrate the difference that they share; This birth of Light we celebrate.

The way He walked we calibrate.

He marks our days with life until they're done.

But now we rest on Seasons' glory As beyond year's short, fair, story We're stirrred in daylight-schemes that move us on.

But here! It's cheer and laughs and family And we're a little balmy, as we celebrate The memories that we share, In this time of year, so charming— With a reach that's way disarming, As bells ring-out the sound of Christmas cheer.

It's folk that add life's fuel to Loves' affair.

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BEECH by Jim Hatfield At the back of All Saints church, An old beech stands in advent nakedness, As well it ought. By the front door, A young cherry is already pink with next Year’s bloom. How soon will the beech follow suit?

The seasons are awry. Enjoying the soft sky And Indian-Summer sun, I worry that winter May not come, as it failed to do last year.

Might we not see its like again?

Ill-portrayed as the season of discontent, Winter is renewal time; an opportunity To find yourself, take stock, catch breath, Make and mend.

I had supposed that, with autumn being as It was this year, winter might be hard But I fear that the seasons have been downsized To three; by European decree, perhaps.

Where does that leave me?

This year has not been easy and I would readily Embrace a period of stability. There are gardens to be Weeded. I need time to exorcise ghosts, build bridges And patch holes; Winter things.

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Then today, a biting wind drives clouds of snowPromising grey and, in doing so, puts my mind at ease.

A sense of order is restored. Winter is within reach And though my heart bleeds for the cherry, My soul is with the beech.

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Bio/Comment Kirsten Luckins is a poet and performer based in Hartlepool. Her first collection, 'The Trouble With Compassion', will be launched by Burning Eye in March 2016. She is currently working on a spoken word show to accompany the collection, which will be her second solo touring show. This piece comes from another work in progress, a play based on the myth of Persephone, featuring poetry and provisionally titled 'Demeter In Winter'.

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Persephone Is At That Difficult Age by Kirsten Luckins She is none of my doing, the creature on the stairs, Descending like a dune-walker, a water-carrier, Sheer legs vulnerable as poppy stamens, Eyelashes clotted black, opium on pinheads.

Hours adrift in the three-winged mirror, She sees a woman. I see a dead-faced child, Too-pale foundation, tousled hatchling hair.

Will I forbid? Will she defy? She glances At the door behind me. This is not the dance She wants; she wants the dark that pulses dark And light, it promises to find the place inside, She feels it. Can’t quite put her finger on it.

Sands blow over the lost temples of Astarte, Where the sacred dancers greased their eyes so, Cat-whisk to the brow, thin gold applauding At the subtle wrists, gripping at the upper arms, Finespun pleats from rib to frangible ankle.

She stands, cup-bearer serving her own breasts, Redrawn as exotic, she can barely see herself, Her birchleaf hands, her hips where the wrens nest, The summer moors in her eyes. But he will see.

His eyes have fingers, where they touch they wake Tendrils in the skin, green shoots of new vines.

She wants him to take her and make her into wine.

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No Choice by James Graham A young woman I didn’t know got on the nearly empty morning train.

Strangers sit apart. She sat just opposite, crossed her legs and said ‘That’s me’. I looked her over, as young men do. We talked a little, laughed a little. Already there was no choice.

I found her in the student library. We talked about Eng Lit, especially our much admired new friend John Donne. Chaucer we didn’t like.

As young men do, I asked her to the pictures. Or lunch tomorrow at the Papingo? She said pictures.

On that day we changed trains. No pros and cons, no weighing up, no maybes. We began a new, long journey. Sad brief goodbyes and glad reunions, seldom jaded conversation, Mozart and Beethoven, Prague and Paris, meetings and marches to celebrate the elusive doves of peace: these were the stations of our pilgrimage.

Two baby girls awaited us.

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Bio/Comment James is a pushcart and best of web nominee, and his poems were selected for inclusion in The 100 Best Poems of 2016, 2015 & 2014 Anthologies. He has published 3 collections of poetry, “The Silent Pond” (2012), “Ancient Rhythms,” (2014), and “LIGHT,” (2016), 3 novels, 35 short stories, and over 930 poems.

His fourth collection of poetry will be released this year. He earned his BS and MA from California State Polytechnic University, and his doctorate from BYU.

I Hear Someone Speaking by James G. Piatt I hear someone speaking, not as hawks screeching in the sky as they soar up and over the wind currents, but like the timid wren flying almost motionless under the limbs of giant Oak trees sitting in the haze of a lazy pink tinted dawn.

The timorous moments of the past along with past memories merge into visions of the present. I watch the blue ripples of the stream’s surface lapping at the ecru shale sides of the hill and my mind becomes accustomed to the silence that beckons me as I hold my breath in anticipation. Fading ghosts of the past surface in my mind again, and I remember tombstones with names and voices, I knew so well, etched in marble, memories, and echoes.

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Bio/Comment Roberta Feins was born in New York, and has lived in North Carolina and Seattle. She has degrees in Social Science (BA), and Marine Ecology (MS), and received her MFA in poetry in 2007 from New England College. Her poems have been published in Five AM, Antioch Review, The Cortland Review and The Gettysburg Review, among others. Her chapbook Something Like a River, was published by Moon Path Press in 2013. Roberta edits the e-zine Switched On Gutenberg (http://www.switchedongutenberg.org/).

Paysage by Roberta Feins Countryside

We drive through hills bellies and thighs of earth.

Patchwork of vines on South-facing hills, clouds of chestnuts on the North.

I want to wear these hills fabric woven of sun and leaf granite and burn My breasts clothed in forests of teaseled velvet, rough-napped, brocaded skirts of splendid spreading chestnut leaves, knotted with hard-husked jewels.

Silken rill unwound from a larval cocoon between my thighs.

Descending a forested dale cool breeze sings with many birds.

To the west the Pavilion of Alix Countess of Provence flower of the troubadours her beauty & her violet eyes to the north, the River Aveyron: fluttering bird catching bugs on sorties from a low oak branch.

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Note: her beauty & her violet eyes: quoted in Paterson, Linda M. 1995 The World of the Troubadours: Medieval Occitan Society c 1100 - c 1300. Cambridge University Press.

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The Barn at Gospel Eddie’s Pond by Tom Sheehan Some barns know how to kneel; this one does, looking over shoulder, sighing, whispering, I’m never sure which in these bird-gray mornings.

Oh, all they tolerate: host armies, creeping squadrons, dragooned columns, gnawing at time, flighty creatures busy as town Saturdays, ceding fathoms to dark hungers.

Their warp and twist of timbers silent as skulls, heady lintels and cross braces straddling chest being crushed, sills aching to cry, all stand their serious doubts.

They cling at selves, members of a most immediate family waiting for a wake to happen, or a song of reprieve at dusk, heaving into morning’s mirror another night of soul survival.

It is why I love my old barn, one like most others, falling down slowly, taking pulse at oak wrist, find its own bright heart of tree

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cored grace in gallant crosspiece, joist, perhaps in hoof-thinned grasping plank, or, in summer's ever-high loft, dreams cached away for awed awakenings, odors barns have a right to keep.

Here, at pond-side, I look over shoulder at a barn looking too, back at slow, labored beginning, feel crosscut vibrate, axes shiver at hewing, two men’s breath rising in a column as if one lung works, ritual of barn raising, cutting at air. .

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Bio/Comment Clare McCotter’s haiku, tanka and haibun have been published in many parts of the world. She won the IHS Dóchas Ireland Haiku Award 2010 and 2011. In 2013 she won The British Tanka Award. She also judged the British Haiku Award 2011 and 2012. She has published numerous peer-reviewed articles on Belfast born Beatrice Grimshaw’s travel writing and fiction.

The Seer by Clare McCotter after Everlasting Moments

Painting portraits for the poor she had a way of seeing some gladness in a child’s closed eyes or ghost smile in the corners of blackberry mouths.

Carving corridors through time to the hour love waited on the ground her photographs were proof of rag nails and ringlets rickety limbs laid out as if asleep.

Framed by smells of soup and sweat placed on a window ledge beside the ivy in its pot none thought strange the only memento they could have when death came swift and soft.

Staring into the camera’s eye her own crowded with dusk and crushed violets she kept safe small hands and warts made luminous bone white cheeks.

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A Mountain by Wassily Kandinsky Darkening with the seasons and a husband’s mood her miracles of silver and light injure with the certainty of the moment more than a fist ever could.

The old Contessa camera she hid from him at the back of a musty drawer down on the silent street a dusting of snow falls on the mane of a heavy horse.

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Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse; The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there; A Visit from St. Nicholas Attributed to Clement Clark Moore (1823)

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A Conspiracy of Love

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Bio/Comment "My ruthless jailers. M.E. and Social Anxiety, have curtailed my career as a teacher of French and Spanish.

On the flip side, this affords me more time to write poetry; to scribble down thoughts which need to be vented or to simply indulge my passion for pure sillliness."

Writing to complain by Lesley Timms Summer air scented sweet by the jasmine’s Starry flowers round the old cottage door.

Golden thatch; ivy-framed lattice windows; White dovecote; rippling brook; flowers galore.

In the parlour, an Inglenook fireplace; Head-high beams; musty smells. A delight!

Sunshine dappling the faded chintz armchairs, My idyllic retreat for the night!

But at midnight with thunder clouds crashing Came a scratching outside on the pane.

Such a nerve-shredding, unworldly scraping, Whilst the howling wind moaned out my name.

Knees a-knocking like frenzied woodpeckers, Whimpering, I quaked under the sheet.

Then a gnarled hand smashed in through the window, Clawed the bedclothes and tickled my feet!

The stench of decay scorched my nostrils, Wretched hags cackled out of the gloom.

Weeping warts; swivel-eyed; breath like sewage, On the mirror one etched ‘Meet your doom!’

Crazed and gibbering, I lurched to the kitchen; A huge spider stood blocking the door!

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Slobber dribbling, he eyed me for breakfast, As a change from his snacks of wild boar.

I streaked, half-deranged to the toilet, My bowels somersaulting with fear.

But relief turned to castrato screeching When a rat bit a chunk from my rear!

But the reason I want to complain, sir, Why I’m fuming, what irks me the most: On arriving at Cosy Nook Cottage…..

There was no blinkin’ bread for my toast!

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Catching the Wind by Oonah V Joslin Dainty, yellow jasmine flower, twisting in the twilight air, Toying are you with the dark; Darting this way, flutt’ring that; Star-struck in the gloom of dusk; Caught there on a spider-line.

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tiny fairy skirt, quite the little flirt. finished with the day? can’t you get away?

I see how you’re pinned a lure to catch the wind.

Bio/Comment Marie Fitzpatrick is an editor, writer, designer and artist and in her spare time she writes music. "I wrote these poems for my granddaughters, Aine, Sinead and Mia, and my niece, Ruth and nephew, Senan as I couldn't be with them at Christmas "

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Christmas Forest by Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick The forest has days marked for tree collections.

It knows the time woodcutters come to call.

Then it warns the trees marked-out for inspection, And it shows them how to faint before the fall.

And mummy trees speak of children's pleasure, When they see the decorations on the morn, On the one saved in, cold, mid-winter weather, That celebrates a new babe that was born.

And on the eve of felling the trees gather.

To hear the tales passed down from days-of-yore.

And they laugh and chat, and party all together.

They are happy to be filled with season's lore.

And when the trees fall-over in the forest.

Their buddies cheer them on and wish them well, And when men drive them down-the-road to market New trees are planted from the seeds that fell.

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Santa’s Belt by Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick (For Aine, Sinead, Mia, Ruth and Senan) It’s sleighs ahoy! Cargo and gifts are loaded and Santa helpers are on stand-by

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T

1. he elves are resting in the yard, their work now mostly done, and admin. staff are filling out cards, inputting kisses and words of fun. They’ll be addressed at country way-stations, where Orion and his aides have the belts to sort through the gifts of the nations: Gifts that were prepared at Santas' request.

Now it’s the early AM in morning and they wait on a spark from the sun that will connect two belts in a starchime when Santa’s and Orion’s will become one. But there’s a problem on earth in the snow fields. A cloud has dropped down from the sky and it’s blocking the sign from Orion, and he’s mad, and he wants to know why.

For Orion is a giant among huntsmen, a son of the god of the sea. And he’s a boyfriend of Dawn, and a good one, so he calls her but she says: Let it be.

‘Let it be, let it be,’ he murmurs. Then hollers. His YELL echoes down through the sky and it rolls out a clap full-of-thunder that scares off the cloud and its ploys. Then as day breaks over the tundra, the sun blazes sparks full-of-joy and Santa’s belt lights up for the run-day, and his sleighs lift into Dawn’s sky.

11.

It’s Rudolph that leads-out the procession. That boy! Knows his way through the stars, and the herd follow through without question as a breeze hums a few festive bars. These bars were composed on a spectrum by a master who followed his heart and his tunes were saved in life's session to be replayed by the wind on bar-charts.

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Now the sleighs pull-in to a spiral that takes them onto its run and Orion watches their arrival: His helpers are awaiting the fun. They have been viewing earth's cities at nightime. For weeks they've been preparing the drops and to help Santa deliver the presents: They have seeded time-lines with special, spell, crops. These, they'll attach to sleigh's tack when they get there: They'll be dropped from the sky down to earth. Then the sleighs will hover o'er houses where they'll wait, just like a ship that berths.

It's how Santa gets round to all children. It's how he visits all homes on the earth. It's with the help of Orion and his powers that no child goes without Christmas mirth.

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111.

And so the spiral curves-up towards the bright star. It's powered by its own tricity and when Santa's team arrive they are rested, for the star pulled them through the melee. And millions and millions of presents are tumbling through this earthly decree: Their bright lights you can see on the starline, they're near the moon if you look closely. And your name is on one of the presents that are rolling in the heart of the sky, for this night the co-ordinates are coded so that they'll drop straight to you from on high.

It's kudos to Orion and to Santa for straying in life's multiverse. But it's the love of all children that they muse on. It's safe in their hearts: There it rests. ###

ART1: The Red Sleigh by Clarence Gagnon, Date: 1925, Style: Art Nouveau (Modern), Genre: landscape 2 Horse Racing In Winter by Clarence Gagnon, Date: 1927, Style: Art Nouveau (Modern), Genre: landscape, PS. MLF 3 Sleighs Ahoy, PS, MLF, 2016

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Bio/Comment William Allingham (19 March 1824 – 18 November 1889) was an Irish poet, diarist and editor.

He wrote several volumes of lyric verse, and his poem 'The Faeries' was much anthologised; but he is better known for his posthumously published Diary, in which he records his lively encounters with Tennyson, Carlyle and other writers and artists. His wife, Helen Allingham, was a well-known water-colorist and illustrator.

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The Faeries by William Allingham (A Child's Song) Up the airy mountain Down the rushy glen, We dare n't go a-hunting, For fear of little men; Wee folk, good folk, Trooping all together; Green jacket, red cap, And white owl's feather.

Down along the rocky shore Some make their home, They live on crispy pancakes Of yellow tide-foam; Some in the reeds Of the black mountain-lake, With frogs for their watch-dogs, All night awake.

High on the hill-top The old King sits; He is now so old and gray He's nigh lost his wits.

With a bridge of white mist Columbkill he crosses,

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On his stately journeys From Slieveleague to Rosses; Or going up with music, On cold starry nights, To sup with the Queen, Of the gay Northern Lights.

They stole little Bridget For seven years long; When she came down again Her friends were all gone.

They took her lightly back Between the night and morrow; They thought she was fast asleep, But she was dead with sorrow.

They have kept her ever since Deep within the lake, On a bed of flag leaves, Watching till she wake.

By the craggy hill-side, Through the mosses bare, They have planted thorn trees For pleasure here and there.

Is any man so daring As dig them up in spite?

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He shall find the thornies set In his bed at night.

Up the airy mountain Down the rushy glen, We dare n't go a-hunting, For fear of little men; Wee folk, good folk, Trooping all together; Green jacket, red cap, And white owl's feather.

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If I Knew If I knew the box where the smiles were kept, No matter how large the key, Or strong the bolt I would try so hard, 'Twould open I know for me Then over the land and sea broadcast I'd scatter the smiles to play, That the children's faces might hold them fast, For many and many a day.

If I knew the box that was large enough To hold all the frowns I meet, I would like to gather them every one, From the nursery, school or street, Then folding and holding I'd pack them in And turning the monster key, I'd hire a giant to drop the box To the depts of the deep, deep sea.

Anonymous

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Short Bio

harles Robinson was born in Islington, London, England, on 22nd October 1870.

The son of an illustrator, and the brother of illustrators Thomas Heath Robinson and William Heath Robinson, he spent his early education at the Highbury School of Art. Robinson then went on to serve a seven-year apprenticeship at Waterlow and Sons (a lithographic printers in Finsbury). He was also an active painter and in 1892, Robinson won a place at the Royal Academy, but was unable to take it up due to lack of finances.

It wasn’t until the age of twenty-five that Robinson began to sell his work professionally. He quickly developed his own unique style, based on the then contemporaneous influences of Pre-Raphaelitism and Art Nouveaux. Robinson was particularly inspired by the delicate watercolours of Aubrey Beardsley, Japanese artworks, and the woodcuts of the old masters such as Albrecht Dürer.

His first full book was Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses (1895). It was commissioned by John Lane. This collection of children’s poetry first appeared in 1885 under the title Penny Whistles, but it was Robinson’s beautiful set of 100 pen and ink drawings that really brought it to fame. The book was very well-received, going through a number of print runs.

Robinson married Edith Mary Favatt in 1897 in Middlesex, England and they raised four daughters and two sons. ###

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Lines spoken after the ghost’s exit Act I, Scene 1 from Hamlet by William Shakespeare (1603) BERNARDO: It was about to speak, when the cock crew.

HORATIO: And then it started, like a guilty thing Upon a fearful summons. I have heard The cock, that is the trumpet to the morn, Doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding throat Awake the god of day; and at his warning, Whether in sea or fire, in earth or air, Th’ extravagant and erring spirit hies To his confine; and of the truth herein This present object made probation.

MARCELLUS: It faded on the crowing of the cock.

Some say that ever, ’gainst that season comes Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated, The bird of dawning singeth all night long; And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad, The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike, No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm, So hallow’d and so gracious is the time.

HORATIO: So have I heard and do in part believe it.

But look, the morn, in russet mantle clad, Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill.

Break we our watch up; and by my advice Let us impart what we have seen to-night Unto young Hamlet; for, upon my life, This spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him.

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Bio/ Comment Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850, he was the son of a light-house engineer. The poem 'Christmas as Sea' first appeared in the Scots Observer in 1888, several years after the publication of 'Treasure Island.' The poem is told from the point of view of a crew member sailing through winter seas and it's thought likely that Stevenson had firsthand experience of a similar trip.

He died at the 44 years of age, in Samoa, in 1894, he was 44 years old, like Yeats he wrote his own epitaph and it was iinscribed on his tompstone. It reads;

Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you 'grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill.

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Christmas at Sea by Robert Louis Stevenson (from Ballads, 1890, originally published in The Scots Observer, 1888) The sheets were frozen hard, and they cut the naked hand; The decks were like a slide, where a seamen scarce could stand; The wind was a nor’wester, blowing squally off the sea; And cliffs and spouting breakers were the only things a-lee.

They heard the surf a-roaring before the break of day; But ’twas only with the peep of light we saw how ill we lay.

We tumbled every hand on deck instanter, with a shout, And we gave her the maintops’l, and stood by to go about.

All day we tacked and tacked between the South Head and the North; All day we hauled the frozen sheets, and got no further forth; All day as cold as charity, in bitter pain and dread, For very life and nature we tacked from head to head.

We gave the South a wider berth, for there the tide-race roared; But every tack we made we brought the North Head close aboard: So’s we saw the cliffs and houses, and the breakers running high, And the coastguard in his garden, with his glass against his eye.

The frost was on the village roofs as white as ocean foam; The good red fires were burning bright in every ’long-shore home; The windows sparkled clear, and the chimneys volleyed out; And I vow we sniffed the victuals as the vessel went about.

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This day of our adversity was blessed Christmas morn, And the house above the coastguard’s was the house where I was born.

O well I saw the pleasant room, the pleasant faces there, My mother’s silver spectacles, my father’s silver hair; And well I saw the firelight, like a flight of homely elves, Go dancing round the china-plates that stand upon the shelves.

And well I knew the talk they had, the talk that was of me, Of the shadow on the household and the son that went to sea; And O the wicked fool I seemed, in every kind of way, To be here and hauling frozen ropes on blessed Christmas Day. They lit the high sea-light, and the dark began to fall.

“All hands to loose topgallant sails,” I heard the captain call.

“By the Lord, she’ll never stand it,” our first mate Jackson, cried. ...“It’s the one way or the other, Mr. Jackson,” he replied.

She staggered to her bearings, but the sails were new and good, And the ship smelt up to windward just as though she understood.

As the winter’s day was ending, in the entry of the night, We cleared the weary headland, and passed below the light.

And they heaved a mighty breath, every soul on board but me, As they saw her nose again pointing handsome out to sea; But all that I could think of, in the darkness and the cold, Was just that I was leaving home and my folks were growing old.

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The bells of waiting Advent ring, The Tortoise stove is lit again And lamp-oil light across the night Has caught the streaks of winter rain.

In many a stained-glass window sheen From Crimson Lake to Hooker's Green.

Christmas by Sir John Betjeman

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Murmurations

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Bio/Comment "I am a retired school teacher living in New York. I have a MFA in creative writing from City College"

My Father Made Men by R.p Verlaine Though he never much went to school-he taught me lessons I haven’t found the distance to forget.

Carved into memory that dawn thunder shook

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the morning like a fever choking me in a grasp of power too foreign to understand.

My father’s rifle obliterating nature’s calm without warning.

And the bird that fell silent bleeding and dead from the sky was only my first lesson at age six.

Holding up the destroyed bird to me-he said, “death, this is what happens to all of us.”

Scaring me so horribly that I burst into tears and ran to the cottage.

That night, my father said to my mother“maybe it’s your fault, I don’t know but it will take longer than I thought to make him a man.”

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Bio/Comment This is a poem inspired by folk tales my Scottish mother told me when I was a little girl.

She is a wonderful story teller!

ANGEL, SWEET LADY by Hannah Welfare Tightens Ribbons Around my plaits Presses A coin Into my palm I open my fingers And the gold Flashes In the cold Sun At night My sloe dark Hair Falls To my waist My pale Angel

Drags

A wooden Comb

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From scalp to tip Rapunzel She says Let down Your hair So a prince One night May Scale your walls And love you As gold loves the sun As the sparrow loves the sky As you turn to Sleep Dear child Let your hair Pour over pillow Into the Softness of your Breathing

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Bio/Comment Tina Cole lives in the Herefordshire country side and is an active member of The Border Poets group of writers-https://sites.google.com/site/bpo ets20152/home Her poems have appeared in a number of magazines including Mslexia, Aesthetica, Red Ink and Decanto magazines, and a poem in The Guardian Newspaper following David Morley’s Poetry Workshop.

She is involved with writing and reading poetry in and around Shropshire, Worcestershire and Herefordshire and local festivals.

What really interests her is evocative poetry that speaks about people, their emotions and how they manage their worlds. This poem arose from a visit to a day centre for the elderly.

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JIGSAW by Tina Cole Empty as her pockets she fingers the jigsaw, a thousand pieces of nothing where order starts at the edge of an idealised world that builds now to now with each additional piece and a frame that waits for colour.

Vague shapes lumber the room, her mind crowds with odd gait reminiscences, Sunday dresses, sensible sandals, three bridesmaids in peach while the fireplace mirror reflects all this as if it were worth re-knowing.

In the late February darkness the wind practises its toothless whistling.

Tea is delivered in the worship of speed and convenience.

Sunday best memories neatly folded, her slippered feet seek a walking frame, as jigsaw pieces scatter.

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Bio/Comment Julian Dobson lives in Sheffield, England. His poems have appeared in publications including Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Poets’ Republic and Clear Poetry, and on a bus in Guernsey. He tries to post a poem a week at 52poemsinayear.wordpress.co m

Composting by Julian Dobson Old meat attracts rats. It should be destroyed.

The rest's good for mulch. Here's your smile, its sunburst the day we planted the beans.

Remember the runners, the way they tendrilled the poles, how they waved at us? Last week I cut them, scissored their stems into wiry handfuls, the right size for rotting.

There's more. Onion skins, courgette stems, chilli seeds: meals we shared, plum stones discarded by friends, the aroma of citrus, a lingering of coffee grounds. Endless teabags, the finings of silent, companionable breakfasts; the peel of our Christmas satsumas.

And under the lid, look - celebrations of worms.

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Laceless by Jim Hatfield They were my own boys’ ages and just as hapless, asking for a toothbrush and permission to phone home. Both requests declined for they had asked too late.

Like my sons, they wore blue jeans, though not so well-fitting without belts.

With their concertina legs and lace-less shoes they looked like refugees I had seen on the television screen; at once younger than their years and yet aged too soon; denied, first, childhood and now their youth.

I used to glibly say that we are all in a prison of one sort or another; a marriage failed a job we cannot stand, opportunities not grasped when we held them in our hand.

The sort of thing which, once upon a time we might have simply come to terms with after a while or half- dismissed as just the blues.

I doubt I shall again confuse discontent with concertina legs and lace-less shoes.

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Bio/Comment Haiku, and particularly linked haiku, has always been a favorite form of mine. I find it adapts itself adroitly to travel poems, love letters, and seasonal musings. With my art and writing students in Brooklyn, New York, a popular prompt is collaborative “Exquisite Haiku” modelled on the Surrealists’ exquisite corpse figure-drawing game. They especially like folding the paper and passing it on – it makes them feel like little kids again.

And the results can be hilarious or profound.

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Winter Haiku Sequence by Liza McAlister Williams I’d had enough of that hazy, hot and humid.

Loving winter chill.

Lashes wet, nose drop quivering as if it will hang on until spring…

Leafless trees making silhouettes like brush paintings in three dimensions.

Icicle – a kind of frozen glacial timeline writ extremely small.

The birds travel far and not by plane, boat or car.

They know where they are.

And the seasons they go round and round and round and round and round and round.

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Cold Cast by Clare McCotter Evening in Dublin by the canal we walk among barefoot tracks tracing new moons in the curve of a shoulder stopping to rest a hand on the head of a skeleton dog.

Their sea-grey rock pool eyes deep set in bone jutting like stars through papyrus.

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Night in Budapest by the Danube flowing icy and black beside brogues with shabby uppers laced high heels scuffed men’s boots rusting beside a child’s stumpy pair.

And inviting a foot to slip inside the peak toe sling back given meager warmth from a tea candle’s little light.

Borderland between day and night in Lampedusa by the Med spiriting away their juniper twigs and crystal the gypsies are gone and the flowers sellers still have not come.

In the empty hour before dawn all is calm and turquoise nothing stirs save the last star flickering on the horizon it will vanish soon.

Falling into a reef of cold cast shoes the sea’s corroded floor.

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STARLINGS by Jim Hatfield

November 2015

Aerobatically bold, starling murmurations are mesmerizing to behold. Spectacular gyrations; whirls, twirls, pirouettes, spirals, swirls and rotations enacted with a speed and precision that takes the breath away.

Quite a different feat of flight, I think it fair to say, from the motley choreography a dozen rooks performed above Penrhyn today.

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Bio/Comment Julian Dobson lives in Sheffield, England. His poems have appeared in publications including Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Poets’ Republic and Clear Poetry, and on a bus in Guernsey. More of his work can be found at: 52poemsinayear.wordpress.com

Goitside by Julian Dobson They cut the water. Bent it from meanders to turn mill wheels, beckoned it from the beck to run a rigid course. Tamed, apparently, it licked the soot from honey-shaded stones.

Like factory hands, it only stopped in corners where it could hear no orders, shelter moss.

Today foundations crumble underfoot.

Ahead, security fences take a nap, loll on their backs and rust. A square, tilting towards the forgotten goit and framed by wide-eyed dereliction might be where magic starts. Shreds of green; seeds, spores, windblown dust. Roots tougher than tarmac. One or two summers, a scatter of thistle. Ragwort. A storm.

Rain runs to this future. Takes blackened spaces back. Winds sift warehouses to tilth.

Summer grass sways and stretches, conjures gold.

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LIVING by Jim Hatfield Live every day As if it were your last, Without expectation Of the future or attachment To the past; For every moment Is the only time in which We can fully be, is what the Guru said to me.

I felt it best Not to question wisdom Imparted by a two thousand Year-old tree.

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On Christmas day we all played football, in the mud of no-man's land Tommy brought a Christmas pudding, Fritz brought out a German band And when they beat us at the football, we shared out all the grub and drink And Fritz showed me a faded photo of a dark-haired girl back in Berlin For four days after no side fired, not one shot disturbed the night For old Fritz and Tommy Atkins, they'd both lost their will to fight So they withdrew us from the trenches, sent us back behind the lines They brought fresh troops to take our places and told the guns, Prepare to fire ...

From: Christmas Eve 1914 by Mike Harding

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Other Dreams

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Bio/Comment I've worked as a waiter, fisherman, journalist, painter, and short-order cook. My awards include the New Letters Poetry Award, the All Nations Press Chapbook Award, and The Chiron Review Novella Prize. My fiction and poetry have appeared in New Letters, Nimrod, Southern Humanities Review, Rosebud, Rattle, Descant, Crab Creek, Natural Bridge and elsewhere. I've published three chapbooks and my poems and stories have been included in numerous anthologies

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The Boundless Arc and

Other Dreams by

Michael Campagnoli

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Part I: The Good War

-1-

homas Cantata was only 20 when he came to the Western Electric. An immigrant’s son in a land full immigrants. Still a boy, really. Burnished by wild, inchoate dreams, an unspoken faith in the rude potency of youth, the promises of a country still young, still flushed with victory and ascendance, still drunk on bootleg whiskey and its own triumph. A boundless land of excess and contradiction.

They called him “Tarzan,” back before the War, the good war, WWII, back before the BUST, the Depression. Hoover was still President and he, Thomas Cantata, was just home from Nicaragua, just out of the Marines. A kid, but big: a 48” chest, a thick bull neck, “Mr. Hudson County.” He lifted weights, boxed, was a member of the Milo AC’s, played catcher on their baseball team, fullback on the Stapleton Indians. He tried very hard to be “American.” And he believed in the future, that limitless and linear future, with a blind and infinite faith as if it were a sacrament of the Church. “Ah-meddy-ga,” his immigrant father pronounced it, as if the word itself—Ah-meddy-ga—were promise enough.

But in the summer of 1951, Thomas Cantata needed more than promises.

Promises didn’t get him out of that stinking apartment next to Jooche’s Candy Store on Avenue B, didn’t pay doctor bills, car payments, didn’t put new shoes on his kid’s feet, buy him a baseball glove. He wasn’t a quitter.

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And he wasn’t greedy. He was willing to take his time. Work his way up. Patience, he believed, was as important as action. But he was stuck, trapped somewhere between blue collar and white, desperate to take the next step: a green lawn, open space, a place of his own, out, away from the heat of the city; away from the shouting, the blue exhaust, the daily assault. He worked hard. Deserved it. This day, he told himself as he flashed his I.D. and walked through the North Gate of the Western, would be a day of chances.

Maybe his last.

-2The Western was a subsidiary of Bell. Plants all over the country. Building more. Diversifying. Haverhill had just gone on line and plans were drawn for others to follow.

The Kearny Works was the oldest, purchased from Henry Ford during the 1920’s. Western’s flagship. They produced telephones, telephone bays, switchboards; supplied Bell with all the copper wire they could use, even had a contract for top-secret missile components. Weekly shipments of apparatus, equipment, and cable averaged over 1,500 tons carried by 15 rail cars, nine piggyback trailers, and 92 trucks. Their engineers were working on a “picture phone,” a problem they were certain to solve in five or six years.

Tom worked on the third floor, Section C, of Twenty-four Building. Section C was long and narrow, windowless. Two rows of desks flanked a center aisle. The desks toward the front were larger, smaller toward the back. At the top right corner of Section C was John Wagner’s office. Tom’s desk was directly behind Wagner’s secretary, Marge Prehodka,.

Wagner sat at his desk with the door open. He looked up when the whistle blew, walked to the door, and closed it. Tom searched his face for a hint. There was none. The meeting was set for three. Their decision final.

That would be it.

Tom was a Program Planner. There were ten. It was their job to keep inventory moving, coordinate production and assembly with sales. When the demand could not be met, Tom knew if people were dragging their feet or not. They couldn’t bull him like the others. He knew each foreman by name, knew just what button

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to push. He connived, flattered, cajoled, intimidated when necessary. It was not unknown to see him stalking the wire mill or the floors of a production building, cornering a startled, white-faced foreman as he went to lunch or loafed in the tiny cubicle of his office. If it was clear Kearny couldn’t handle the order, Tom revised the production schedule or used his considerable skills of persuasion to make deals with Merrimac or Kansas City.

He wheeled and dealed them over the phone, became known as the man to see if there was an emergency or a problem. Even the engineers called from time to time, and so did the people in KC or Connecticut. For all this Tom was paid $6240 before taxes. That was all right. A kind of test. Paying his dues. Now, the time had come.

Nate Flemming’s supervisor job in Manual Apparatus was opening up. Perfect for Tom. He’d put in 5 years there as an assembler, knew the staff, was liked and respected by them. A natural. From there, who knows? Section Chief ? Department Head? It was not out of the question.

Time collapsed and expanded.

Once the phone rang and Tom started to deal, time accelerated as it always did. But during the lulls, the minutes and seconds passed slowly. He’d catch himself staring out into space. It was an effort to concentrate.

At lunch, Tom stared at the salami and cheese Madeline made. He’d take a bite, but taste nothing. Might as well have chewed on paper. At times he felt driven and couldn’t sit still. In other moments, he experienced a strange sense of paralysis, a kind of psychic displacement. He was afraid to be confident.

He’d had one promotion after another. Nothing spectacular. Often horizontal. The prize he wanted most, however, a job in management, supervision, had been withheld. Twice applied, twice denied. A brick wall. He fought very hard. He always fought hard, but he couldn’t seem to make the leap. Before the war, line supervisors were hired from within. Art Pierson down in Key Equipment was the last to make it from the ranks. A good natured guy with a friendly smile, but he didn’t have Tom’s acuity, his ability to cut through the static and clutter to get at the center of things. Had Tom not re-enlisted at the outbreak of WWII, he probably would have made supervisor by sheer attrition. He didn’t have to go. The company was a defense contractor. But he went because it was the right thing to do. After the war, the supervisory jobs went to “Manager-Trainees.” College boys. Snotnosed and wet behind the ears. Maybe this once an exception could be made.

After lunch Chuck Rawlins had a problem out in Kansas City. Merrimac was giving him the stall on a shipment of conductors. He needed that shipment to meet a deadline. Tom was on the phone with both of them for most of the afternoon.

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briefcase under his arm. Tom watched him go, his phone cradled in his left shoulder as he wrote down the specs that Chuck Rawlins was giving.

At ten to four, he could stand it no longer. As others packed up, he took his phone off the hook and waited. He was thinking about going home that night, announcing his victory. Madeline would dry her hands on her apron. Tears would be in her eyes. They’d dance in circles in the kitchen. Tom was at the top of the pay scale for an hourly employee, but still, they couldn’t make ends meet. First came the kids, one after another, then Madeline’s operations. Always one bill away from being out of debt, living without worry.

Marge Prehodka looked at Tom and smiled. A big woman, in her mid-forties, sturdy, with peasant good looks. “Don’t worry,” she said, “they’ve got to give it to you.”

Tom smiled. He sat up straight, shoulders square, chin tucked.

“This time is it,” Marge said, “I know it.” She patted him softly on the back.

Minutes passed.

Four o’clock, four-ten, four-fifteen.

-3Long after the whistle had blown and the others gone, Wagner walked into Section C. Tom came to attention. Wagner walked past without even glancing at Tom. He put the key in his door, opened it, and went in.

He left the door ajar.

Tom waited.

Seconds passed. Minutes maybe.

The two men sat without speaking.

Tom didn’t have to ask, he already knew. He drew himself up like the top sergeant that he was, chin tucked, chest out, shoulders back, and walked through the open door.

The two exchanged a look.

“Ah, hell,” Wagner said, and turned to stare out his grease-smudged window.

Only a few years older than Tom, Wagner looked mid-to-late fifties. Physically incongruous. Tall, with an unusually large bulldog head that communicated power, authority, but the overwhelming impression of his body was weakness. Clearly, he’d never had a day of physical labor in his life. Thinning grey hair brushed straight back.

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Wire rim glasses. A sour schoolmarmish look. The heavy head, massive, drooped down into thin, sloping shoulders, wide hips, and a bovine paunch. His skin was pale, soft, almost adolescently effeminate. It gathered into delicate pouches around his eyes and nose, dolloped into jowls. Beneath his chin were particularly supple folds that he nervously caressed while in thought or conversation. Tom had the distinct impression that if he thrust his forefinger into Wagner’s belly, he could, without much pressure at all, puncture it as though it were a bladder full of dough.

“You should be proud,” John Wagner said. “What would I do without you? ” He lowered his voice to sound paternal. “Six months, who knows, maybe something will open up.” He patted Tom on the shoulder and closed the office door. That was it. Clean and efficient. The blade delivered. The wound bloodless.

-4-

The elevator doors closed into a tight little box.

Tom stood alone in the elevator. Swift and noiseless, antiseptic, it carried him down. Like the quiet of the confessional. He took a deep breath and relinquished the last fleeting remanence of hope. He knew, and knew with a certainty, it was over, done, and he floated effortlessly down.

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Part II: The long way home -1The bus lurched, surged, stopped, and surged again. Arms and legs and shoulders intruded. Diesel fumes and human musk pressed close. Smothered by proximity. Air. Space: he needed space. He pulled the cord and got off at Avenue A. Down the sidewalk full of murderous intent, dangerous, wanting to throw a punch, but at what, at whom? He looked from face to face, watching for a smirk, a dare, anything to set him off. His insides rotten.

All the years nullified by a “policy. " Who were they kidding? The rich boys wanted to keep the club to themselves. How could a piece of paper, nothing but dried ink, be more important than the pumping blood, the loyalty and sacrifice, the hard, clean native intelligence of a man who never quit, never gave less than it all.

The Western had changed. Once the warm center of the universe.

Down E 25th Street, he decided not to tell Madeline. Why tell her? What was the point? Not enough bad news to go around? Besides, with each year she became more and more like her mother. Hard, unsympathetic. “The hell with her,” he thought, “the hell with all of them, everybody.” He caught and held a breath in his chest and fought back the fury and pain. He was forty-two years old and it wasn’t turning out like he thought.

-2“You’re late,” Madeline said as he opened the screen door.

She had her back to him, hands in the sink peeling potatoes. He could tell by the hunch of her back that she was angry. “Did you stop at the Greek’s?”

“Let me get in the door.”

“Did you stop at the Greek’s?”

“No,” he answered.

“I suppose you forgot the milk?”

There were times when the tone of her voice could drive him crazy, make him feel murderous. If she’d just shut up, he’d say, then I’d be all right. But usually, he was not all right.

“Thank you very much,” she added, drying her hands on a towel.

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learned to do for herself, learned what it was to have money of her own. Even as they spoke, she had an application in at Glenco. If Tom knew, he’d be furious. But Glenco was nearby. Walking distance. She could leave after Tom left in the morning and be back before he got home at night.

“So what’s the big deal?” Tom asked.

“Nothing,” she said.

She banged around in a cabinet, withdrew a large black skillet, and thrust it on the stove.

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“I mean nothing,” she answered.

Her voice choked a little. Her eyes began to fill.

“What ‘s going on?” Tom asked.

She sniffled. There were gurgling sounds in her throat.

“Christ! So I forgot milk.”

Madeline spun around. The word “Christ” scalded her. She was Baptist. Profanity always produced some sort of physical reaction. It was one more thing she held against him. Standing with her hands on hips, blue eyes cold and narrow, she said, “And meat from the Greek’s.”

“Yeah, meat from the Greek’s. Big deal. I’ll pick it up tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow will be too late!” She turned from him to face the counter.

Jesus, he thought, is she going to cry? He hated it when she cried. It wasn’t fair. She’d come on tough, then resort to tears. Can’t I ever have a rational discussion with you, he’d say.

“Late? What difference does it make?”

“Never mind. It doesn’t matter now.” She rinsed and peeled potatoes and dropped them into a pot of boiling water.

“What’re you giving me?” he said. “What’s the big deal?”

“You probably forgot that, too,” she said.

“For Christ’s sakes, forgot what?”

“My MOTHER!” she said, turning towards him triumphantly, “coming for dinner.”

“Ah,” Tom remembered, it was Friday.

“I guess you’re just too busy.”

“I’ve had a tough day.”

He knew then, he’d never tell her.

“My mother’s not important enough.”

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“All right, all right, I forgot.”

“When it comes to her, you always forget.”

“I’ll pick something up now.”

“Too late. I already called. She’s not coming.”

“So I forgot.”

“Because it was my MOTHER you forgot.”

“I shoulda’ figured she was behind this.”

Madeline glared.

“Christ,” he said, “half the time I can’t even get a decent meal around here, but let the old battleaxe show up . . . and I’m supposed to pick up a roast! You think we’re made out of money? She wants a roast, let her chip in for it.”

“Maybe if you made more . . .” Madeline cried.

There was a pause.

They faced each other.

She stared at him, feet wide apart, a sneer on her face. Her whole body expressed defiance.

“I told you,” he said evenly, “this month things are a little tight.”

“Tight? You can’t put food on the table,” she told him, “then I will.”

Tom’s expression changed.

“What—did—you—say?”

She turned to the counter, began slicing beans for another pot that was boiling.

“You heard what I said,” she said, knowing that she’d gone too far, knowing that she wanted to go too far.

In one deft movement, Tom shoved the chopping block aside, scattering beans in the air, sending the block into the pots of boiling water, knocking them off their burners. The water sputtered and hissed. Standing perpendicular to her, one arm braced against the counter to block escape, he stared in silence, his face only inches from hers.

She flinched, then froze.

After she acknowledged the supremacy of his gaze, he nodded and said, “All right, then.” Marine tough, the top sergeant. He stalked from the kitchen, down the hall to their bedroom.

For a long while, Madeline didn’t move.

“Let him try and pull that again,” she said as she retrieved beans from the floor. “Let him lay a hand on me. He’ll rot in jail before he can bat an eye. Him and that filthy temper.” She’d been prepared to move out for

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the last six months. Just waiting for that application down at Glenco. “Let him swagger and bully all he wants,” she thought, “he’ll find out when he comes home to an empty apartment.”

They wouldn’t speak for days.

At six-thirty, Tom sulked in the living room, reading the evening paper.

Madeline rolled blood-brown liver in white flour, then tossed it into a skillet. The liver snapped and sizzled. She went to the screen door and called, “Joseph, Joo-seph.”

No answer.

She checked the liver and returned to the door. “Joseph, Joo-seph,” a musical lilt in her voice Joseph was eight, born nine months after Tom enlisted and went off to war. Tom was thirty-two, older than most recruits, and had a deferment from the Western. He had to pull strings in the front office to make sure those deferment papers weren’t sent. He thought it was the right thing to do. Madeline, pregnant and left alone with two other children, never forgave him.

“Joseph,” she called as Tom brooded.

Where the hell is that kid? Tom wondered. He ought to come when he’s called.

“Joo-seph,” she called sweetly, “Joo-seph.”

Babies him too much, Tom thought. She’ll make a pansy out of him.

Joseph was a late baby. The others, Tom Jr. and Joan, were already out of the house. Madeline let Tom think that Joseph was a mistake. A love child. Actually, she lied about her diaphragm.

“Joo-seph, Joseph,” she called, first a high note, then a low.

Still no answer.

He’s got to learn respect, Tom thought.

He was already angry when he pushed his way past her out on the porch. Before him was a clapboard maze of fences and a wide alley that separated the back of one apartment row from the other.

“Joseph,” he yelled, a deep male voice.

There was no answer.

“Joseph!” he yelled more loudly, anger beginning to build. “JOSEPH!” There was no sign of the boy.

It was one thing to ignore his mother, but his father?

“JOSEPH!” he roared.

He hears me. But he won’t answer. I’ll teach him to answer.

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“JOSEPH!” he bellowed, “JOSEPH!” Children stopped their play. Old women stuck their heads out the tenement windows. “Whatta’ you lookin’ at,” Tom scowled at one of them who quickly withdrew as he stomped down the back stairs.

“JOSEPH!” he yelled at the landing.

“He hears me God damn it,” Tom said, blood pounding in his ears, pumping his arms.

He was out the back gate and down the alley toward the vacant lot where the kids played stickball. “I’ll teach him,” Tom snarled and the whole neighborhood watched. Adults cleared a path. Mothers drew their children close to them. The thick arms and dangerous hands swung back and forth, broad shoulders squared; sweat pouring from his brow, hair a tangled mat. Eyes in a black frenzy rolling, he looked like a madman.

Madeline, gripping the porch rail, watched from the third floor landing, mortified.

At the end of the alley, a small brown-and-white mongrel began to bark and nip at Tom’s heels. Tom dispatched him with a single kick. For a moment the dog became the focus of his rage. Tom took several steps after him, the creature howled in a hasty retreat.

Tom bellowed, “JOSEPH!” one last time.

Madeline looked on helplessly. She stood on the landing, biting her lower lip and working her hands.

“Tom,” she called meekly, as he turned the corner and disappeared from view. Her body sagged at the railing.

She hid her face from the prying biddies in the windows and on the stoops. She took quick, short breaths. Her stomach churned. There was silence.

Children emerged slowly from their hiding places. Heads up, eyes wide, they peered tentatively after Tom. When certain they were safe, they returned to play. They ran and shouted and cried. One or two, chasing the little ones, imitated Tom. Extending their arms before them like movie house monsters, they cried grossly, “Jooooo-seph!” There were girlish peals of laughter and high-pitched shrieks.

Madeline shivered as if it were cold. She didn’t know what to do. When he got like this, he was capable of anything. Feeling the eyes of the neighborhood upon her, she wanted to cry. She looked to the end of the alley and waited, overcome with dread. It was all too much. She just couldn’t take anymore. It was all too much.

Less than a minute passed when motion in the alley stopped again.

Down at the end, there was a commotion.

It was Tom and Joseph.

The two rounded the corner, Tom holding Joseph by the arm and beating him with his free hand. The boy looked frantic. He dodged the blows and struggled to escape. At one point, he wrenched his arm free and ran.

But Tom caught up to him easily and began smacking him on the head.

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The alley receded before them. People came to their windows, dogs barked, children cried. Men in undershirts smiled confidentially. Old women shook their heads. The crowd followed, but kept a respectful distance.

Madeline could hear Joseph’s cries. She sprang from the steps, down through the backyard in a matter of seconds. They collided at the back gate where Madeline hurled her body between the man and the boy.

Tom tossed her aside.

Joseph ran for the house.

Tom caught him as he reached the stairs.

“Now you’ll learn,” he said and those thick, heavy boxer’s hands fell.

Madeline picked herself up and charged between them once more.

“Don’t you hit that boy!” she cried, “Don’t you hit him!”

The three became entangled, pushing and shoving, lunging back and forth. An absurd dance—tied by an invisible cord—like molecules irrevocably drawn and repelled, attracted and struggling violently to be free.

The crowd followed, but none dared intercede. Many stunned. Others smiled cynically, enjoying the grief.

“Out of my way!” Tom roared. “He has to be punished!”

Sweat poured down his face, his back, his belly. Black hair glistened in the evening summer sun and stuck to his forehead in languid curls. “He has to be punished!” He pushed Madeline with such force that she fell to her knees. The boy darted for the steps, Tom hot in pursuit.

“Don’t you run from me,” he warned. “Take it like a man.”

By the time Madeline regained her footing, the boy had reached the third floor and Tom, in quick pursuit, sprinted the stairs two at a time. Madeline raced behind them, weeping as she ran.

The screen door opened and slammed one after the other.

Madeline caught Tom in the hall.

“Get away from me, woman,” he yelled, “GET AWAY!” She used her squat body like a bowling ball, barreling into him with all her might. She wrapped her arms and legs around him and tried to pull him down, but just did not possess the strength.

Enraged, nostrils flared, panting in the brutal heat, eyes afire. “GET AWAY!” he bellowed. They bumped and grappled in the narrow hall.

“Don’t you hit him!” she screamed.

They crashed and pounded the walls. The old sheetrock groaned. But she would not give. At one point, she got her hands up in his face and pushed on his chin. She straightened her arms for leverage. He grunted, growled, rolled his eyes like a comic wrestler. Just when she thought she gained advantage, he grabbed her TLW/130

beneath each arm and lifted her off the ground like a rag doll. With a grunt, he tossed her into the wall. She hit with such force that the sheetrock cracked and crumbled around her. She collapsed to the floor, breath knocked from her, motionless.

“Joseph!” Tom yelled.

Tom entered the boy’s room. “Hide from me will you!” he cried., his eyes wild, primordial. He threw the closet door open and thrashed about in the dark. “Hide from me,” he kept repeating, “Hide from me!”

He upended a chest of drawers, threw blankets in the air, knocked over a table and lamp. Things crashed and tumbled. He lifted the boy’s clothes bureau off the floor and banged it against the walls. When he threw it down, it bounced back and smacked him in the face. He howled, bit his fist, and punched the door with such concussive force that it splintered and wrenched off one of its hinges. He finished the job with a following left, then added a left-right-left combination for good measure.

The boy didn’t make a sound. He shivered under the bed.

Tom lifted the mattress, threw it awkwardly across the room. He lifted the frame, springs and all, and flung it to the other side.

The boy didn’t run. He hugged the floor. There was nowhere to go.

“Hide from me,” Tom roared and started to deliver a blow. But the thick ham of a hand did not fall.

Madeline charged into the room and leaped on Tom’s back. Tom swayed and buckled. The momentum made him take several drunken steps. Swinging his head from side to side. He steadied himself, grabbed Madeline by each arm and simply lifted her off. He turned, held by the shoulders, until she was calm.

He looked at the boy and was wounded by the fear and confusion in his eyes. Of all of them, Tom loved this boy the best. Tom Jr. was a Momma’s boy. He whined and complained, made excuses for himself. Joanie was a good girl but they were never close. She was hardheaded like Tom’s brother, Gaetano. But this boy. This Anthony. Such a tender heart and a sweetness. He swelled with love for this boy. In a lifetime of struggle and pain and disappointment, the boy was a gift, all unlooked for, precious, and the thought of harming him was intolerable. How did I do this, he thought, and rushed from the room in shame. He walked down the hall, through the living room, and out the front door. He walked and kept on walking, until the adrenalin drained from his body. Hands in his pockets, he stared vacantly in store windows, avoiding his own reflection.

Without knowing exactly how he got there, he found himself at Jooch’s Candy Store on the corner of E. 21st. He was heading south. His body making the choices, leading him back. To the old neighborhood.

As if it were home.

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-3East 15th Street was alive with sound and motion.

Mothers, babies at their breasts, sat on the stoops fanning themselves. Old ladies dressed in black supported by canes carried packages wrapped in brown paper. Pretty shy-eyed teenage girls, their ripe legs squeezed into tight blue-jean shorts, giggled and smirked. Children everywhere. The ripeness of fruit from the grocery stalls, the cooking smells of olive oil, onions, and garlic frying in a pan. Hauptman’s Butcher Shop.

Maffucci, the undertaker, with the same artificial flower set-piece, there since Tom was a kid. Ubiquitous tricolored flags. Copies of Il Progresso. Cheese and salami hung from deli walls. Venuto’s Fruit & Vegetable Stand.

Scarcelli’s Statuettes & Relics. Geno Cubelli stood in the doorstep of his shoe repair gesturing plaintively to Tessa Gasbarro. She, of the eyes wide, shook her head and argued fervently. One winter night when Tom was a kid, he saw Cubelli clubbed by two beefy Irish cops. Geno hadn’t paid the “tax.” “Just a way of getting flush,” the small, fat one smiled and shrugged.

Medegones.

“Keep to ourselves,” the old people told him, “Better that way.” Most never left the neighborhood.

Never saw the inside of an A&P. Passing by an alley, a dark-haired woman leaned out a second story window. “Go to Carmine,” she called to a boy on the street, “put it on Pipe Dream.”

She tossed down a ten-dollar bill.

“Which one?” the boy cried as he stooped to pick it up.

“Pipe Dream,” she repeated and he scampered off.

-4At the end of the block, he ran into Pauly Lupo.

“Hey, Tommy, how ya’ doin’? ”

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Pauly was tall and slim with slicked-back hair and dark wolf-eyes. A mouth full of perfectly straight sinister teeth. “So how’s the kid?”

“Okay,” Tom said, “what’s up?”

“You know me. Always ready for action.”

A Camel cigarette dangled from his lips.

In the old days, when Pauly’s perfectly straight teeth were perfectly white, he had a killer smile. Used to get a lot of women. They called him “Blackie,” then. Always out of work. Sometimes Vince G let him run errands up to Saratoga or around the neighborhood. But only for small change. Pauly had a bad memory. He’d get the numbers wrong. When he was really tapped, he’d go down to the waterfront and find a busone, the ones willing to pay to give him a blowjob. When it was over, Pauly would beat the poor guy unmercifully, just for the hell of it.

“Why do I do it?” he’d ask and you really didn’t want to know. Pauly was a kind of non-person. “Neither large intestine nor small intestine,” the old Italians would say. Born and raised and lived his whole life with little notion of the outside world. But neither did he follow the old ways. Kicks. All he wanted was kicks.

“Hey Nunz,” he yelled back to a group huddled around a radio, “look who’s here.”

They were listening to a Yankee game. Making bets on the side. Shouting at each other, pointing two pinkies up and down, the scongiuro, to ward off bad luck. “Figlio di puttana!” Nunz cried. He wore a tight “GinyT,” had curly black hair, and tattoos on both arms. Nunz looked up, nodded, but didn’t smile.

Between them, Tom thought, a busload of whiny snot-nosed kids and wives who work like horses while they loaf. I’m better than that. In other parts of the city, people wore white shirts and ties, they shaved everyday, they didn’t hang out on street corners, they weren’t still wops.

Tom walked on.

“Keep your bowels open,” Frankie shouted, hands cupped to his mouth. Then he smiled his yellow smile and laughed. Laughed hard, until he coughed and spit and lit up another Camel.

-5Further down the block, Tom passed his brother’s barbershop.

Il taglio di capelli, the front window said. Una spuntatina. La frizione.

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Older than Tom by two years, Gaetano and Tom were not close. Their mother had throw buckets of ice water over them to stop the fights. Even as adults there was a lingering unease that neither could understand nor articulate.

The shop was locked.

He kept walking.

-6“He’s on the roof,” old Mrs. Venuto grunted. She pointed to the back door as if Tom didn’t know.

He climbed three floors.

Richie was over by a pigeon coop. In one hand he held a long bamboo pole. He flicked his wrist to direct the flight of his flock and looked up surprised.

“Hey, Merico,” he called, switching hands, breathing hard, as the pole whirled. Shorts and a T-shirt, a wide block of a man with a chain and a crucifix around his neck.

When they were kids, they practiced trumpets in the back room of Richie’s father’s store, sneaking peaches and plums, big dark purple grapes, playing “Midnight in Moscow.” “Haaarumph-pa,” Richie’s 300-lb. father would sneeze, the impact of a low-end earthquake. “HAAA-rumh-PA!” and the two would gag themselves trying not to laugh.

Tom smiled. “Sorry about your Dad.” Richie shrugged, his eyes revealed a wound that would not heal.

Richie had a union card. A Teamster. Didn’t have to stay in the neighborhood. Could afford to move out.

Once, Tom asked why. “Dunno,” Richie answered. “Your own block. Know what I mean? Il mio posto.”

Richie laughed. At the time, it was just what Tom sought to escape. The smother of relatives and friends, the village mentality, the small-time and all-embracing Onore della famiglia. He wanted out. Now, what Richie had, didn’t look so bad. No mortgage, car installments, no stress. Cheap rent. Ten minutes to his garage. Plenty of time with the kids. He flew his birds, sat with the old men, sipped espresso or home made wine. No mugging, robbery, rape. His daughters came and went. No one dared lay a hand on them. C’è da fare o no? The neighborhood.

The sound of voices rose up from the street.

That time of night.

The telephone was disdained. Telephones were for long distance. You want to talk, open a window. What

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once seemed hopelessly backward and old-fashioned, seemed now to hold a certain charm. There was a comfort and a deep connection he had always denied in the ongoing traditions.

“Papa, Papa,” a young girl shouted from the top of the steps. “You got to come now! Nonna says Father Patrick needs it by eight!”

“Okay, okay,” Richie yelled back. “Tell Nonna I’ll be right there. My mother, God bless her,” he crossed himself quickly, “is in good health, but always busting my hump.”

“I got to get going anyway,” Tom said.

“Don’t be a stranger,” Richie told him.

-7Tom knocked on his Uncle Leo’s door. No answer.

From the back of the house, he heard the whine of a joiner. Walked down the narrow driveway. Leo was in the converted garage he used for a shop. The joiner hummed, then shrieked. There was a wood-splintering skirl. Curlicued splices of pine fell at Leo’s feet. Sawdust from the table-saw fanned by the joiner’s exhaust filled the air, settled on Leo’s head, hair, arms, and eyebrows. He lifted the wood and ran a finger over the edge, blew away the sawdust, inspected it again. The joiner moaned to a stop.

Leo considered himself something of a red-haired Romeo. Shameless. Every waitress. Every salesgirl.

The younger the better. “I think she likes me,” he’d say and nudge Tom. Tom would blush. It was not unusual to find a female guest in the loft over Leo’s shop in the middle of the day. It was not unusual for her to be the wife of another man.

Leo was a skilled craftsman. When Tom was young, he’d hang around the shop, help when he could.

From Leo, he learned the love of the meat of smooth white wood. Of turning raw lumber into a clean line. Of solving a problem. Meeting a need. The delight of invention. The joy of discovery. Tom reached for the door, but just as he turned the handle, the machine kicked on again.

I’ll catch him later, he thought.

When Tom and Gaetano were boys, they saw Leo lose a finger on this same machine. A momentary distraction and, just-like-that, the finger was gone. Leo looked at the bloody stump and gave a cry that wasn’t like a man at all. The finger was never found.

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He walked down the cracked cement driveway feeling empty and alone.

-8Dark had descended.

He found himself before his boyhood home.

The house was a misty radiance in the summer night. A golden bloom. This house that he associated with his mother. He thought of an early Easter morning, just after dawn, when he was a little boy. He and his mother stood on the very spot, watching an Easter procession march down the street to St. Jerome’s. He gripped his mother’s hand in fear, hid behind the folds of her new pink dress.

They came out of the mist dressed in red. Announced by chains. Sheepskins on their heads. Wooden masks with horns and protruding teeth. Horrible creatures, running toward him, crying,“Morte! Morte! Morte!”

His mother picked him up, held him tight.

“Non li danneggerano.” she said. “Li manterrò sicuri.”

She pointed up the street to a statue of Jesus being carried by a group of grey-haired men. In the opposite direction came Maria, Lady of Sorrows. Both were protected by angels with swords. When they tried to meet in the middle, Death, dressed all in yellow, and the Devils swarmed. A terrible battle ensued. One by one, Death and his Devils were killed and Jesus returned to his Mother’s side.

“Sicuro,” his mother cooed, “Sicuro.”

Safe in Momma’s arms.

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He adored her. But she wore out. Just wore out. CeCelia, Tom’s younger sister, was frail, suffered from colds and flu’s. Tom’s mother would make tea from the mallow plant, wrap potato slices around her wrists, cover her chest with a garlic polenta. Nothing helped. “She needs a doctor,” Tom would yell, “not these stupid village ways!” At six, Celia was diagnosed with TB. “Consumption,” they called it. “Can’t get her to eat,” Momma would say, eyes desperate. Cake. Cookies. Nothing else. At ten, Celia caught a cold that turned to pneumonia and she died. A terrible death. It broke his mother’s heart. Six months later, she was dead, too. Tom missed her every single day, every single night. He remembered his father, eyes fierce and pitiful, tears cutting his cheeks like acid, as he edged the cold chisel into the stone forming the names of his wife and only female child. A bleak December day that changed Tom’s life forever.

The family just fell apart.

Tom’s father, Gaetano, traveled up and down the East Coast. He carved sarcophagi for gravestones and monuments. When he was home, he expected to be treated like a king. Tom and Willie, his brother, resented it: the Old World manners and prerogative, the immigrant ways. Tom and his father quarreled. The old man would get his razor strop, chase him from room to room, out the back door.

After one of their fights, Tom lied about his age and joined the Marines.

The two stood on the platform without speaking. The train whistle blew, Tom turned to go. The old man grabbed him, gave him a hug, a kiss on the cheek. Tom nodded and pulled free, picked up his suitcase and climbed on the train. The old man was devastated no different than he. The memory brought Tom pain.

“Would it have been too much,” he thought, “to give him a hug, to turn and wave?” Tom was his last hope.

Blood of my blood. Flesh of my flesh. The old man stood alone, a broken figure in baggy pants and wrinkled coat.

The immigrant.

The old man was hopelessly old fashioned. He wore garters on his sleeves, red suspenders. Such a wop.

Tom was a new generation. Born in this century. Twice he fought for the idea of democracy. It was something his father and his father’s generation could not conceive. They barely thought of themselves as Italians, much less Americans. Still a village mentality: loyal only to the old ways, the old rituals, the old superstitions and customs.

Medieval. Not me, Tom thought, I make my own way. He was independent. He was an American.

Tom looked up at the house.

The lights were on. His father was home.

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He wanted to go in, longed to, yearned to tell his father what was in his heart, to embrace the old man like he should have so many years ago. But he couldn’t do it. He didn’t know why, he just couldn’t do it. He looked up at the glow of the windows and shook his head.

-9The Marines taught him discipline. Gave him a home. For the first time in his life, he felt useful, worthy.

They didn’t care where he came from, what his last name was, that it ended in a vowel. They cared only about courage, character. Nicaragua taught him that he was not a coward and that there were other ways to die than TB. The first week back from the Marines he landed a job at the Western.

His first job was in construction. Not unlike being back in the Marines. A big tough kid among other tough men. “Tarzan,” they called him. Even the old-timers gave him respect. Nights and weekends he trained, fought, and won sixteen professional fights. He only had $48 to show, but that was ok until somebody wised him up. His manager, Jimmy Minks, “Red the Fireman” they called him, routinely pocketed Tom’s share. When he found out, Tom went to the gym, decked Red, and never picked up a glove again. He was young. There was always baseball and football. After all, there were those scouts from the Redskins and Yankees. They were interested. But then came the injury to his back, and that ended, too.

What made him want to be more than “Tarzan” was his marriage to Madeline. He married out of the faith. And she was not Italian. She put ideas in his head. Soon he applied and was accepted as a cutter in the wire mill. Over the next eight years he was promoted several times to different jobs, each more difficult, each with more responsibility. And then for a time he worked with the engineers, and did well, became a pretty good problem-solver; good with numbers, he was surprised to find. Picked things up quickly. Was able to absorb atmosphere, context. Tom was over 30 and the engineers in his department were just out of college, but they respected him. His physical presence, military manner and bearing. His straight-forward, no-punches-pulled approach to things was more than a little intimidating. They called him, “Sarge.” By then he knew the company inside out.

It didn’t bother Tom when they took credit for his work. He didn’t care. He was a team player. The engineers moved on to five figure salaries and Tom moved to a desk in Twenty-four Building.

But he was on his way. Only a matter of time, a willingness to work hard, to sacrifice. He’d always worked hard. The Depression didn’t touch him. That’s why he re-enlisted in 1942: he owed it. It was the sweat of a man’s brow, his courage, his native intelligence. That’s what marked manhood. America, he told himself, was the TLW/138

last clear test of a man, a real man. It was something to fight for.

But that was before the War. Now, you could go just so far, no further. Now you needed a “degree.” Manager-trainees. College boys.

Tom dropped out of high school to join the Marines, to fight the rebels in Nicaragua. Now they wanted him to be a “college boy?”

Before the War, he had an unconscious faith in “They.”

“They” were “bringing him along,” were watching him. He didn’t know who “they” were, exactly, but “they” had their eyes on him. He didn’t have to worry, to scheme, to be ambitious—all he had to do was try his hardest and the rewards would come to him. “They” would take care of him. “They” had something in mind.

“They” knew what was best. From construction to machine operator in the Metal Shop, to load regulator in Manual Apparatus, to tester in the Wire Mill, to Engineer Associate, and finally, program planner in Centralized Production Control. “They” had brought him along, like a promising rookie, a thoroughbred colt. Job to job.

With ease and confidence. The money didn’t change much, but that was OK. It would come.

Now, he was ready for the next step—Supervision, maybe even Section Chief. Everything pointed to it.

He wasn’t deterred by others being promoted before him. He wasn’t deterred by two previous attempts. “They” were just testing him, making sure he had the right stuff. Like old football coaches or the officers in the Marines.

“They” talked about him behind closed doors: “See that Cantata today? A real comer.” That’s what they said and the Big Boys blinked their eyes and nodded. “They” brought him along. Prepared him. Slowly, until he was ready.

Now, Wagner was telling him he needed a degree; had to have it.

Walking down Avenue A, he was struck by the idea that maybe all this college talk was just bunk. He had a sharp eye and ear for bunk, a built-in bunk detector. Maybe he just wasn’t “good enough.” The idea hit with tremendous force.

He stopped in mid-stride.

His heart constricted.

There was a dry, hard ache, a hollowness in his belly.

Not good enough? Not good enough? The anger began to pulse through his arms and legs. Who were TLW/139

they to question him, these pencil-necked and gutless wimps? Soft-bellied and splindly legged? Safe behind their desks. Never faced danger or threat, fear or death, never met the gaze of a man who meant them harm. He could break them in half with his bare hands. He stalked the pavement full of fury, the old grief of not belonging, homeless, lonely and forsaken. Naked in the dying light of the raw New World.

-10He found himself back at the old ballpark where he was the slugging catcher for the Milo AC’s. In the old days, the entire neighborhood turned out for a Milo game on Sunday afternoons. They’d bring the whole family, spread the blanket, put out the picnic lunch, and stay until dark. It wasn’t like that now.

Those were the days, he thought, when the crowd was a-buzz and he strode to the plate, late in the game, with two men on and the Milo’s needing a hit. What a time, what a time. He hit three homers in a single game, and three, again, in the next. No one else had ever done it. No one had done it since. Those were the days that couldn’t last too long and they seemed to go on forever. The girls thought him handsome. Young boys followed him everywhere, fighting each other for the honor of carrying his glove. And everyone was sure, so sure, that someday he’d be somebody. This is what he was thinking as he walked toward the field.

Yeah, he was going to be somebody. It brought bitterness and irony. That was when the scout from the Yankees came down and offered him a contract to play in the minor leagues. Everyone talked about it, but his father was against it. The old man could not comprehend the idea of being a professional athlete. Someone paid you money to play games? That’s what children did. They played games. What kind of work was that for a man?

Madeline was proud of Tom because the others cheered, but didn’t know the first thing about baseball. She was against it, also. Too risky, she thought, better to have a regular job, security. So Tom turned down the offer and that was the end of the Yankees.

But the golden days of summer remained forever in his mind.

The pure, clean crack of the bat, the solid feel of ball on wood, the unselfconscious, uninhibited grace of time and rhythm, the unity of mind and spirit and body as the ball went towering, sailing, defying the laws of gravity, soaring, as if it would never come down. Those were the days not bounded by time. No confusion then,

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no talk of computers or degrees, no guided missiles, no talk of spaceships orbiting the moon, traveling to Mars and Jupiter and Pluto and out beyond the galaxy itself. Before the great leveling of television and radio, before the Bomb, and before the Russians having the Bomb, and the threat of annihiliation. We were a continental nation then, large, boundless, but yet, like a little island in the world, all to ourselves, a bastion, a shimmering paradise. Still regional, even more than regional, just a vast collection of neighborhoods, and the ends of the world had nothing to do with galaxies or solar systems. It was the flight of the ball, its boundless arc, as it reached the tip of the sky. That was it, Tom thought, the tip of the sky, and that’s all we had to think about.

But the ball came down. It always came down. Though sent rocketing aloft with all the power in his body, though hit further and more fiercely than any other, it finally, inevitably, came down. No matter how high it soared, no matter how omnipotent the feeling, no matter how powerful the self-will, the ball inevitably, implacably, obeyed the rules of nature, and fell to earth with a deadening thud.

Tom leaned an arm on one of the bleachers, one foot propped on a lower step. He stared out on the empty field. The outfield grass was thatched and tough. The infield rutted and marred by weeds and clumps of ornery grass. The wooden bleachers and the wooden walls were cracked and faded and dry, in need a good coat of paint. The rusty backstop had several holes. What a shame.

Who cares, Tom thought, what difference does it make? Nothing matters.

He wanted the memories to come back, but they were gone. They wouldn’t come. He tried so hard to remember.

He began to walk.

With the outfield grass under his feet, he felt nothing at all. He remembered faces and a few of the names, double-plays turned with grace and precision, the crowd stuffed into the bleachers, overflowing, spilling out on blankets on the grass along the outfield foul lines and behind the wall. He remembered the sight of the ball as it soared into the air; he remembered that he put three into the lake, distances later measured to be more than five hundred feet. He remembered all this, but he could not remember the feel of it. He saw the crowd rise to its feet when he came to bat, their deathless eyes and mouths opening and closing, their arms thrust into the air, their hands balled into fists, urging him onward, depending on him and dreaming of glory. But he felt nothing. Memory no longer alive. Like watching an old silent movie. Everything in bloodless pantomime. Even his own actions observed as if from a distance, almost as if it wasn’t he, himself. The old magic was gone and he stood adrift in a sea of stunted, outfield grass.

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He jammed his hands into his trouser pockets and strode briskly from the field. He walked without looking back, like a man with someplace to go.

As he crossed the right field foul line, for just a moment, a brief moment, he heard the snatch of a roar from the crowd and it wounded him. The hair on his back and the nape of his neck stood up. He felt a quick, cold blast, and then it was gone. He kept walking.

Walking, walking, walking.

Walking faster.

Fleeing the phantoms, the ghosts of youthful dreams.

Something had gone wrong along the way and, now, nothing made any sense. And then he was running, running, his legs light and elastic, pumping hard, running against the steel-bright confusion of the day, running from the boundless arc and the doomed, ephemeral twilights of youth.

-the end-

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Late Night Guitar by Tom Sheehan I hear an odd wire vibrate against a dark red wood.

It ripples along, hoarse, talks a mountain to pieces.

All Iberia is elaborate in string and lath; peninsula of high heels, ribbons dancing on the mane, black hats horse-parading, friar’s lantern honing swords.

A later moon of Pico de Aneto dies in the dust of olive trees.

A forlorn SAC bomber, tailed, falcons its way home silently.

When a bull is born the earth shakes twice, and an odd wire vibrates against a darker red wood.

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Bergamot by Pippa Little Persians love all things sour and bitter best of all bergamot’s green rind and cut scent of rain that pricks my eyes with tears.

We only have my fine bone cup’s spiderlings of light, your horn spoon, freckled with sparrow-down, and shared grains of an unseen coast, whisper of perfidious winds.

Longer than old-womanhood and the moon’s recede/return, apogee/perigee, longer than all desire, our journey: the brew is hot now, perfect, let there be kindness enough and time so we drink to the end of it.

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Bio/Comment I'm a mum of three boys, I recently started writing poetry and short stories after the loss of my daughter. Although life is busy I do enjoy writing as an escape and attend a local writing group. The poem I have attached was a homework set by a fellow group member, where we had to use the last line from a book as a first line, in a poem or short story. "But now I must sleep" is the last line from the book Atonement, having never read the book myself, I can only assume its very different from my poem. I hope you enjoy it.

But Now I Must Sleep! by Margaret Kerswell But now I must sleep, I’ve tried counting sheep, But sheep just don’t work!

I counted them jumping right over a gate, The looks they gave me filled with hate, “We’re sick of this gate” they bleated and barred “Our poor legs are tired, it’s getting quite hard!

Round in a circle again and again We’ve already jumped it nine times, maybe TEN! If you’ve got any sense, put your head on your pillow Feel it snugly and warm, like a big soft marshmallow You’ll close your eyes and drift off to sleep And leave us alone, we poor knackered sheep!”

But now I must sleep, I’ve tried counting sheep, But sheep just don’t work.......

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Bio/Comment MY work has appeared in such books as ‘Drowning’ (Scar publications) and ‘The Poet as Sociopath’ (Scar publications). He is currently working on his second volume His first collection of poetry ‘The Destinations of Raxiera’ is published by Hammer & Anvil.http://www.amazon.co.uk/ Destinations-Raxiera. He studied philosophy at Birkbeck College London and lives in Surrey England.

Natural History by Jonathan Beale (Untitled) 1982 mural on boundary wall of natural history museum Maputo by Malangatana Valente Ngwenya The vastness of the eye: Ready to drink until the cup is full Full – is something the eyes Do not know. ‘”More please, Can I have some more, please’” There is no abstract: No abstract here, not of knowledge At least we are here and understand The world in its vast contorting Colour and majesty.

Searching round, behind, Looking up, looking down And around and again And again, look behind Again. It changes daily.

We are one!

In full orchestration the dove Punctuates the whys Everyone in their place The sun sets on enquiring minds.

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Things That Happen While You Watch by Tom Sheehan A thin maple sprig keeps bumping against the package of night closing like a fist around it and refuses to give in.

Loam, the rich nacre of Earth, bottomland in an axial thrust, shoves against a mole until the mole is ingested.

A grain of sand, stretching itself, drives the ocean back, back, always back, against the moon and quahogs.

The green escalator of a field, dizzily, frantically late, throws its goal line toward my son’s feet in bedlam.

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In summer a Bartlett pear, yellow and freckled ripe, skins itself on the teeth of an old man immobilizing a park bench.

The Earth, trying to get away, drives its volume into my eyes.

The corneas explode at impact.

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Monday Morning Blues by Tina Cole Everyone else is out just me and these stained shirt sleeves dangling from the laundry box, when a disembodied tune evokes a liquid memory not edgy or rectangular like words that were shouted, but one that croons, I will sing my own song, and something almost forgotten the forbidden box with tortoiseshell arm traversing black water, undulating to the centre then jumping back as if stung, squatting as if embarrassed.

Precious planets banded by concentric rings, housed in port-holed paper sleeves so fragile, never to be touched yet the clatter of shellack denied that.

A fat needle pinpointing the matter, cutting through rings of dark water an endless spiralling groove at 78r.p.m.

His Masters Voice the papered eye.

Songs that held her in a cracked discordant thrall while neighbours banged she rhumbaed, turned up the volume, laughed at dust and disorder.

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Love Charm by Roberta Feins Bring a bound sheaf cut with your own hand to the cloister’s forest of stone where yew wood used to stand.

Ten somber daws clamor over Pueche Blanc.

Nine bay calves pierce the herd.

Thrash the grain on the tiled floor where monks once paced in silent prayer. Winnow with wicker, then scatter a handful of seed.

Eight hoopoes bloom the linden.

Seven egrets fish the mill-race.

Next day, return, follow the ants.

They scale a carved column, up a story, skirting the binding on Isaac’s wrists.

Six fern fronds toss the wind.

Five Rollers spin the sky.

Around their roof-nest, re-gather what seed you find.

Then form your cake from wheat and water; season with yarrow that grows by the mill.

Four hare harbor in tall grass.

Three kingfishers rattle the channel.

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Bake in an oven fed with oak boughs.

Serve him the cake on a china plate, without a word or smile.

A pair of vixens blaze the thicket.

One wild boar tangles in thorn.

Now at your word, your lover will rise, eager as trout snapping at flies.

Dame heron strikes the fish.

Black-robed daws claim Pueche Blanc.

Note: Pueche Blanc is Occitan (Provencal) for “white hill”.

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Epic by Bill West When's a good time to ponder death, in the morning, late at night when the heart flutters, a bird beating its bone cage?

Is it cheaper, burial at sea?

Could I knit a shroud select a sapling pick a spot with a view?

Burning is better memorial ceramics made from ash or inks to tattoo I still love you.

Or an Epic rocket launched into dark a fading streak one last bang a plaintiff “whee.”

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Bio/Comments "This piece was inspired by

LIFE AND LADDERS by Catherine Power Evans

an older woman with torn tights."

I watched a strong woman today; she carried long ladders on her leg.

She was no window cleaner: there were no cloths, no bucket, just a pair of scuffed patent heels and a handbag of fake crocodile—or alligator, I forget if they have either in Taiwan.

Or China...

Waterford-born Catherine Power Evans moved to Wales where she now resides.Writing poetry and short fiction, her work appears online and in print (e.g. Brilliant Flash Fiction, Silver Apples, North West Words, O’Brien Press (RTE Book Show) and Ballpoint Press (RTE Countrywide/Farmer’s Journal) and The Linnet’s Wings. A member of author, Carmel Harrington’s writing group, Catherine has contributed short stories to its Kindle anthologie.

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She must have been an OAP though she tried to look young.

And rich.

On both counts she almost succeeded but it was the ladders, you see.

She hadn’t checked her behind in that cheval mirror at the Department of Work and Pensions paid-for B&B. I admired how deftly she wove through the onslaught in the street.

Not too shabby in her moves, I’ll give her that.

Balletic even.

All the while carrying those ladders, unaware of her great strength yet in dogged denial of her destitution.

Maybe it’s just as well; knowing things isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

A person needs to dream that they can amount to more than the missed reflection in the absent mirror in the room devoid of humanity at the DWP B&B. Milady there, she carries her burdens like her ladders, behind her and out of sight.

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Bio/Comment John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in New Plains Review, South Carolina Review, Gargoyle and Big Muddy Review with work upcoming in Louisiana Review, Cape Rock and Spoon River Poetry Review.

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RAMSEY by John Grey Ramsey, the cat, crawls up onto the window ledge, looks out at passing pedestrians and traffic and also weather when it does something interesting like rain or hail or blow up a storm.

That feline has no interest whatsoever in the goings on within the house.

Phone calls, shaving, showering, watching television, getting dressed, getting undressed none of it interests that beast.

I provide food, milk and water for Ramsey.

But, though I eat when the food comes from the microwave, he reports to his dish only as his schedule allows.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who lives with indifference but it's unnerving all the same.

If the house caught fire, he would not lick me awake.

When I'm hungover with misery,

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he does not come comfort with a furry ankle rub, a consoling purr.

When people ask if I have a pet, I still reply, yes, a cat named Ramsey.

I don't want them thinking that I live alone, that my life is so boring, so uninviting, that it's just not worth sharing.

One Ramsey is more than enough.

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Bio/Comment I am a poet and writer living in Newcastle upon Tyne. I have had two collections published "Doors " and "Toe in the Tarn". My daughter and I were walking along a lonely section of the beautiful Northumberland coast and we were discussing why we loved such a cold and often inhospitable place. The poem came from that conversation.

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The Beach by Jeff Price On a crisp spring morning with a chill wind biting from the east My Daughter and I walk along the sands from Alnmouth to Craster In the distance two dogs compete to catch a single tennis ball Shimmering silver waves chase the Oyster Catchers from the foreshore Above, on the dunes the wind whispers through the Couch Grass She pulls her hood over her ears and stuffs her hands deep into her pockets Here every Season has its gifts and every step its surprises We talk of past mistakes and undecided tomorrows She interrupts her own thoughts and looks along the empty beach "Wouldn't it wonderful" She muses " if the sun had some heat And our summers were longer than a few tepid days."

"Imagine such a future" I tell her "The beach huts become skyscraper hotels We would be weaving through rows of plastic loungers Music blasting out from beach side bars In the artificial harbour luxury yachts would linger Dunstanburgh Castle would become a theme park" We walk further in silence, past the wind battered beach huts defiant on the dunes Through a narrow neck of rock a lonely fishing boat navigates the choppy water Kipper smoke drifts on the breeze and we offer up a silent thanks to the Baltic Gods

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THOSE ILLEGALS by John Grey The housekeeper is an illegal alien.

You're sure of it.

When she kneels on the floor, scouring grit out from the kitchen tiles, you're watching a criminal in action, worse than a bank-robber or a swindler. maybe even than a murderer.

But she's thorough, you'll give her that.

From sink to table, she doesn't leave a speck of dirt anywhere.

Besides, you can't find anyone local who works this cheaply, this efficiently.

You'd turn her in, make a stand for law and order. but laundry doesn't do itself.

You send her back to where she came from but there's a not so small matter of the rugs.

Who's to vacuum all the plushness if she's in Guatemala?

But one of these days, you'll ask to see her papers.

Some night when she's done picking up yours.

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Late night-train times by Jonathan Beale The night blocks the doorway to sleep, The mystic moth takes me over. Aware of: Vacant pavements – vacant streets Forlorn street lamps bereft of life &light.

I found myself in the accident of dressing That cats and dogs never quite understood.

I found myself taking the train From the diaconal Paddington Station.

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